The Janus Doctor

On December 21, 1980, the author, a morally insane, drug-addicted surgeon hit bottom. Guilty of fraudulent research, he finds himself reduced to a terrified non-entity in a barred bedlam oiled by a system bent on destroying the things that once defined human beings. There, he endures the angst of withdrawal and the savage revenge of a fellow con that had once been the target of the doctor’s ignorant, racist tongue.Prison, however, turns out to be less a punishment than a restorative sanctuary, for there, guided by a notorious Black Panther and a wise rabbi, he confronts a soul overburdened with contemptible sin. Set free by the truth, he becomes humanized and ultimately rejoices in the glory of redemption and resurrection.Interjected between the prison scenes, the author recounts the intimate details that spawned a personality destined for tragedy. He speaks of a childhood spent in a house of horrors, of an adolescence spent slaving in a sweatbox of a bakery, of an obtuse alcoholic father, and an abusive perfunctory mother who, with every other breath, cleverly brainwashes him into presuming he wants to become a doctor.Ill-prepared for college, he resorts to drugs and duplicity in order to propel himself to the top of his class and through the doors of the Kafkaesque training grounds of medicine. His malignant idiosyncrasies carry over into his private practice, causing it to turn into a chaos, which, thanks to a profession gripped by a conspiracy of silence, is allowed to endure for almost a decade. It was not until he cripples a myriad of lives—including those closest to him—that his scalpel is finally taken out of his trembling hands. In need of money, he offers to perform clinical trials on experimental drugs for several pharmaceutical firms. Having no patients, however, to participate in the trials, he invents them and makes a go of it until the Food and Drug Administration stumbles upon his spurious dealings. Striving to thwart their efforts, the author engages in a series of reckless, self-destructive schemes; one of which—the use of drugs and alcohol to beguile his assistant into taking responsibility for his evil—proves tragic. In an Afterword bearing on the portentous problem of Janus doctors, the author discloses that more or less 15 percent of doctors are, at any one time, addicted to alcohol, to other drugs, or to both. And, probably, because of it, kill more people than motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS. He discusses why the problem remains unchecked, and proffers a prescription for its solution.