Dr. Berman's Spleen

Though he has long since turned in his scalpel, ex-Surgeon Edgar Berman still knows how to be cutting. A few years ago, he touched off feminist outrage by suggesting that women might be unfit for the presidency because of their "raging hormonal influences." Unchastened, the Maryland doctor-author, who limits his practice these days to a few old friends, including Senator Hubert Humphrey,* has now taken on a new adversary. In an outrageously satiric book titled The Solid Gold Stethoscope (Macmillan; $7.95), he lays open the foibles and failings of his fellow doctors.

Beginning with what he calls the Hypocritic Oath ("I swear by Midas, my malpractice insurance, the A.M.A..."), Berman lets nary a branch of his calling escape his splenetic pen. To the vanishing, often bungling general practitioner, he says: "Good riddance." His definition of what he believes surgeons regard as a "reasonable" fee: "All that the traffic can bear." Psychiatry, he says, has lately been "lit by rare flashes of brilliance such as transactional analysis and fornication therapy." As for pediatricians, he asks: "What kind of intellect opts to spend the better part of its professional life with diaper rash as its most common challenge?"

Aspirin or Ice Bag. With Swiftian hyperbole, Berman modestly proposes that "over 80% of the patients chancing the physician's skills have little more wrong with them than what a considerate spouse, a kindly bartender or a hefty raise in salary couldn't cure." For most of the rest, he would prescribe nothing more exotic than milk of magnesia, aspirin, an ice bag or Preparation H.

Berman lampoons the growth of big, expensive hospitals--"Blue Cross Hiltons"--where you go "if you are deathly ill and want your body monitored by everything but a kind soul and a gentle hand." He is merciless about medical greed: "Any M.D. who has to worry about his tax bracket after only six months in practice is a folk hero to his peers." Moreover, he insists, even socialized medicine could not bring back the house call, end unnecessary tonsillectomies or make $5,000 operations a thing of the past. For his resourceful fellow physicians would "never allow the manner of life to which they have become accustomed perish from these shores."

Though the book has drawn predictable cries of outrage from many doctors and led one physician-reviewer to note that Berman seems to be trying to do for his profession what Jaws did for ocean bathing, others have been more generous. After reading the corrosive chapter on his own specialty, Heart Surgeon Denton Cooley, himself a target of a few Berman barbs, commented: "A lot of fun." A plastic surgeon said that "anyone who is upset does not have a sense of humor." Rockland State Hospital's Dr. Nathan Kline, who is twitted along with other psychiatrists for pushing pills, perhaps provided the most perceptive analysis: while Berman's book is "outrageously provocative" and sometimes "pure Paul Bunyan," there is behind the barrage a serious intent--not to destroy U.S. medicine but to cure its flaws. In other words, Berman is repeating that most ancient admonition: physician, heal thyself.

* Who may shortly be released from Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he underwent surgery for removal of a cancerous bladder and lymph nodes Oct. 7.

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