An Ode to Hippocrates

NOT AS A STRANGER (948 pp.)--Morton Thompson--Scibner ($4.75).

At an age when his contemporaries dreamed of becoming cowboys or firemen, seven-year-old Lucas Marsh already knew his life work: he would be a doctor. He was handicapped from the first. Mamma, a neurotic and mystic who believed that only the spirit could heal, hated the very idea of medicine and hysterically begged Luke to forget it. Daddy Marsh, the crude, unscrupulous owner of a string of harness shops, insisted that Luke shift his sights to business and the big money. Luke obediently said yes, mother, yes, dad; but what his parents never knew was that they had produced one of life's rare ones: a truly dedicated man.

Lucas Marsh is the hero of Morton Thompson's vast, sprawling novel, Not as a Stranger, a book as fantastically sincere as its hero. When Novelist Thompson died last summer at 45, he had to his credit an intense, rough-edged novel about Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the identifier of childbed fever (The Cry and the Covenant; TIME, Nov. 14, 1949). One thing Thompson had obviously wanted to be: a doctor. Failing that, he had desperately wanted to write well, especially about doctors and medicine. He never became a doctor, and he never became a top writer, but what he lacked in craft was more than made up in sincerity. If Not as a Stranger is nothing else, it is a triumph of I-Will-Be-Heard.

When Lucas' father stopped sending money during his college pre-med course, the boy borrowed; and when he failed to borrow enough, he married for money--not much money, and not, by his standards, much of a woman. Kristina was a well-built Swedish girl from Minnesota who had read nothing, talked and dressed like an immigrant, and called him "Lu-key." But she was the head operating-room nurse at the university hospital, and she loved Luke in spite of all his inhuman fanaticism for his career. She put him through medical school. For Luke, it was the last that mattered.

When in school, Luke saw tarnish on his ideal: students faking their way through, professors who did not know their business, a fine professor of pathology scorned because he was a Jew. But when he went into practice as a small-town doctor's assistant, Lucas came upon more shocking specimens: doctors who let old, indigent patients die to get them out of the way, doctors who refused to answer night calls, a doctor who was a thief. As for Kristina, she was a wonder as a part-time nurse in the shabby county hospital, but as a doctor's wife she was a social embarrassment.

At novel's end, Dr. Lucas Marsh has learned that most men are compromisers, has learned to live with the facts of life without compromising too much himself. He has even learned that Kristina's virtues have it all over drawing-room talents. Most of all, Not as a Stranger is a heartwarming though crudely repetitive story of a passionate idealist whose passion is medicine. No novel ever written has contained more authentic, hard-won facts about doctors, patients, hospitals. Hypochondriacs will devour it; few of those who are not will consider its nearly 1,000 pages a waste if they stick it out. With all its literary embarrassments, Not as a Stranger speaks up for life as few recent literary successes have done.

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