M.D.: One Doctor's Adventures Among the Famous and Infamous from the Jungles of Panama to a Park Avenue Practice

The author, a physician and professor of tropical medicine at Cornell, recounts his life and long career

Writing with freelancer Dahlby, Kean presents a warm, humorous, often profoundly moving memoir. Leaving his Indiana home at age 18 in 1930, Kean attended Columbia University and, in his second year at the medical school, studied with the renowned Francis W. O'Connor, an "irascible Irishman" who pushed him with a "red-hot poker." His medical career began as a scientific sleuth, researching tropical diseases in Panama, and later, epidemics in war-ravaged Europe. Back in the U.S. in a Park Avenue practice, his patients included Gertrude Lawrence, Salvador Dali, Edna Ferber, Martina Navratilova and other luminaries. The epidemiologist's stories inform and entertain, but none so dramatically as his accounts of researching AIDS or treat ing a doomed Shah of Iran.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This thoroughly entertaining biographical account follows Kean from his medical christening at Gorgas Hospital in Panama in the 1930s, through his professional development as pathologist and parasitologist, to his private practice on New York's Park Avenue. Four of the 19 chapters, as well as the prolog, detail Kean's involvement in the flight and medical treatment of the Shah of Iran. Kean's trials, triumphs, misadventures, detective work, and sometimes downright shenanigans are sure to engross the general reader.
- Annette Aiello, Smithsonian Tropical Research Inst., Panama
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.