Berman sees no inconsistency. "I'm not criticizing people for their money, just how they got it," the 60-year-old surgeon says. "Most of today's doctors don't care enough. They're in it for the money and prestige." Berman has earned as much as $60,000 a year and was the very visible personal physician to Sen. Hubert Humphrey. But, he explains, "I wasn't interested in money until I started making it and saw what it could do, such as giving me the freedom to do volunteer and low-paid government work."
Berman grew up in a poor Jewish area of East Baltimore, son of an itinerant jewelry salesman. After working his way through University of Maryland medical school, he served as a Marine battle surgeon in World War II and with occupation forces in China after the war. Until 1963 he had a private practice in Baltimore and designed, among other things, a plastic esophagus used by cancer patients. He also performed one of the first successful heart transplants—on a dog in 1957.
In 1960 he became president of MEDICO, a private agency founded by the late Dr. Tom Dooley which set up clinics in Southeast Asia. When Albert Schweitzer needed a surgeon at his hospital in Gabon, Berman himself volunteered for three months. He later became chief medical consultant to the Alliance for Progress and was setting up programs in Latin America when he asked himself: "Why go abroad when a kid with a high fever can't get help on 125th Street in New York City?"
Berman turned to domestic issues with an enthusiasm not always well advised. He had been Humphrey's doctor since meeting him through MEDICO, and after Humphrey became Vice-President in 1965, Berman was appointed to the Democratic National Committee Policy Council. In 1970 he made headlines with the suggestion that some women were unfit for high office because menstrual and menopausal problems hampered their ability to function. When Rep. Patsy Mink angrily accused Berman of hopeless male chauvinism, he wrote, "Dear Patsy,...Your hormones are raging." Unmellowed, Berman still insists, "I stand by everything I said, but it was silly to make such an issue of it."
This experience in public combat may prepare him for the medical community's reaction to his newly published book. "Over 80 percent of the patients chancing the physician's skills," he writes, "have little more wrong with them than what a considerate spouse, a kindly bartender or a hefty raise in salary couldn't cure." Berman himself is now all but out of medicine, limiting his practice to long-term patients.
Berman believes that impersonal treatment and high fees (he says he never charged more than $300 for an operation) have sensitized patients to "the practice called Mai." He himself has never been sued for malpractice, but when he finished at the typewriter a team of libel lawyers spent three months sterilizing The Solid Gold Stethoscope before it was published.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
