Small takes on a big character
By Benjamin Phelan |
June 3, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE American health care system works - when it works - by shuttling patients around a network of specialists. The highest obstacle to access is usually a lack of money. But the 10,000 permanent residents of Nantucket must also cope with the elements: routine fog or storms can put a stop to all transportation between the island and the doctors on the mainland, 30 miles away, which Nantucketers refer to with some vagueness as "America."
Timothy J Lepore is a 67-year-old Nantucket doctor who stands in for that distant legion of experts. Pam Belluck, a reporter for The New York Times, has devoted her first book, "Island Practice," to a study of Lepore and his anachronistic approach to medicine. Lepore is a polymathic healer, a general practitioner who treats everyday maladies, but he's also an expert on tick-borne diseases, an occasional veterinarian, an alienist to the distraught and a dauntless surgeon. "If you can eat in a public place without a bib," he says, "you can do surgery." If you're hard up, he's pleased to accept oatmeal cookies as payment: "Getting paid is like getting whipped cream."
Lepore is marvelously strange. In the past he's carved his own scalpels out of obsidian; collected dog hair for knitting sweaters; restricted his family's diet to polenta. "He's insane," says his son Nick, a lawyer.
The least of Lepore's eccentricities is that he makes house calls, even when it means searching the forest floor for the dug-out burrow of an indigent called Underground Tom.
Belluck writes in a distant third-person voice and breaks down Lepore's personality into its component quiddities. One chapter, "Moby-Tick," is devoted to his expertise on Lyme disease and babesiosis. Another is a clearinghouse for anecdotes about his surgical daring.
This quarantining of Lepore's quirks into discrete sections means some of the major rhythms governing his life don't emerge until late in the book.
The book's final pages quickly present and dispense with what perhaps should have been the master narrative: Lepore's hospital is being stalked by a corporate entity. Reading "Island Practice" is a bit like watching the NBA on television. The players are enormous, but because the court is so cramped by their largeness, they look somehow diminished.
Timothy J Lepore is a 67-year-old Nantucket doctor who stands in for that distant legion of experts. Pam Belluck, a reporter for The New York Times, has devoted her first book, "Island Practice," to a study of Lepore and his anachronistic approach to medicine. Lepore is a polymathic healer, a general practitioner who treats everyday maladies, but he's also an expert on tick-borne diseases, an occasional veterinarian, an alienist to the distraught and a dauntless surgeon. "If you can eat in a public place without a bib," he says, "you can do surgery." If you're hard up, he's pleased to accept oatmeal cookies as payment: "Getting paid is like getting whipped cream."
Lepore is marvelously strange. In the past he's carved his own scalpels out of obsidian; collected dog hair for knitting sweaters; restricted his family's diet to polenta. "He's insane," says his son Nick, a lawyer.
The least of Lepore's eccentricities is that he makes house calls, even when it means searching the forest floor for the dug-out burrow of an indigent called Underground Tom.
Belluck writes in a distant third-person voice and breaks down Lepore's personality into its component quiddities. One chapter, "Moby-Tick," is devoted to his expertise on Lyme disease and babesiosis. Another is a clearinghouse for anecdotes about his surgical daring.
This quarantining of Lepore's quirks into discrete sections means some of the major rhythms governing his life don't emerge until late in the book.
The book's final pages quickly present and dispense with what perhaps should have been the master narrative: Lepore's hospital is being stalked by a corporate entity. Reading "Island Practice" is a bit like watching the NBA on television. The players are enormous, but because the court is so cramped by their largeness, they look somehow diminished.
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