Ward Healers.(searching for a new doctor)(Brief Article)

My internist retired after a long career, and so I embarked on the quest that New Yorkers pursue with an intensity otherwise reserved for picking a mate, or a college for a child -- the search for a doctor.

I had seen my doctor since the Reagan administration (first term). When I became his patient, he and his partner worked out of a converted two- bedroom apartment in a renovated brownstone in Murray Hill. The hallway and the examining rooms were decorated with historical prints of medieval doctors and their fiendish implements. In the back room sat an x-ray machine that was scarcely newer (it might have killed Mme Curie); the housing was a grainy black metal, like that of an old manual typewriter. Over time, the pressures of regulation forced my doctor to enter a larger association of physicians, called the X Group, as if they were an insurance company or an energy cartel. He was then to be found in a much larger and sleeker suite of offices, carved out of the ground floor of a hotel, behind an expanded bodyguard of assistants. Only he -- and the copies of People magazine in the waiting room (my window on the culture) - - remained the same. Now he is going, and I am alone in the world.

Many people never give their doctors a thought. The young, being immortal, don't need to, and others avoid medicine with the irrational insouciance engendered by fear. But if you do take an interest in your health and how to maintain it, New York offers you a wealth of options, probably unmatched in the country. In the 19th century, the East Side of Manhattan was a string of saloons, breweries, and slaughterhouses. Now it is a great phalanx of hospitals -- factories of health with river views. Other institutions lord it over their own neighborhoods in different parts of Manhattan, like Roman legions garrisoning the provinces. The contrast with the sticks can be shocking. I remember getting sick once up in the country. It took a 20-minute drive by night, past darkened truckers' diners and gas stations, to find a nurse and a tongue depressor. Never again. Unless I am spritzing from my carotid artery, I would drive the extra hour on into Manhattan.

I search for a doctor by taking referrals from friends that I trust, and interviewing the doctors they suggest. The process teaches several things. New York is a capital of correct thought, but New Yorkers in fact operate by a thick rulebook of prejudices, most of which are true most of the time. The prejudice governing doctors is that most of them, and almost all the good ones, are Jewish. In Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth quotes the punch line of an old Catskills routine: "Help! Help! My son the doctor is drowning!"

Those sons and daughters are still charging through med school and saving lives. One Jewish and Jewish-looking friend of mine, whose Ph.D. is in English, can put on a jacket and tie, give his name, truthfully, as ...