WAY before health care reform

In the shadow of the church where I was baptized, the defunct Our Lady of Pity on East 151 Street in the South Bronx, squatted the residence and professional office of Pasquale DiCarlo, MD, the general practitioner who had delivered me. Since old Dr. DiCarlo didn’t subscribe to newfangled notions, he never insisted on appointments for visits. Besides, many of his patients were Italian immigrants who hadn’t yet acquired a phone. On the shingle outside his office he might well have inscribed the motto, “Walk right in, sit right down.”

And sit we did, my mother and I, perched for several hours on the wooden folding-chairs of his capacity-crowd waiting room. Since this was the ‘50s, we children were hardly allowed the run of the place, but had to sit quietly without the benefit of toys, TV, music, singing, dance practice, handstands, video games, selfies, snacks, hydration, bathroom breaks, supportive phone calls from Granny, verbal and physical altercations with parents, or other distractions. Instead, I would leaf through yellowed issues of Life or Look.

It was the doctor himself who often stepped out into the waiting room with a stentorian “Next!” since his wife — who functioned as receptionist, office manager, and nurse — only worked part time. Slinking through the doorway with my mother, I needed all my inner resources to avoid passing out with dread.

Dr. DiCarlo’s inner sanctum was a creepy, ill-lit assortment of severe old furniture and household junk, since his exam room doubled as storage space for his apartment upstairs. Bottles of green and purple liquid medicines were scattered everywhere. The scant air in the windowless office smelled as if it had emerged from a huge balloon blown up months earlier. His sturdy oak desk was strewn with mildewed correspondence, and gleaming steel instruments lay ready to hand on all sides. The crowning terror of all was an enormous stuffed owl peering down at me from its perch atop a tall, cobwebby cabinet crammed with urine samples and souvenir specimens pickled in formaldehyde. I imagined the owl hooting, “I too, I too, was once his patient …”

Our family doctor was a husky old fellow with a gruff voice and brusque manner, steel-rimmed glasses, a hospital/medicine aroma about him, a disinclination to laugh or smile, no discernible fondness for children, and a notorious hypodermic technique that made me quake. All my visits followed a stylized format. After trying to asphyxiate me with his adult-size wooden gagger and scowling at my tonsils (never forgiving himself for not having yanked them out), he listened to my heart with a stethoscope whose bell seemed to have come directly from the miniature fridge in the corner. Then, having wrapped a massive cuff around my arm six or seven times as if he were starting to embalm me, he took my blood pressure and segued into the treatment portion of the visit.

Like ancient Gaul, this was divided into three parts. First came the excruciating injection with a blunt needle that had gone through a pro forma sterilization in a dinky saucepan at the rear of his office stove. Then il dottore sat behind his desk to relax with a Pall Mall while writing out the prescription (which he signed so that all the other letters of his surname were encapsulated within a gargantuan initial D). The prescription, always for something like “Cherry-O-Mycin,” sometimes had greater emetic than antibiotic effects. And last came the capstone of Dr. DiCarlo’s tripartite medical intervention — the injunction “meno sale!” (less salt!), which he shouted at me even when I had diseases like bronchitis.

“Don’t worry, you’re healthier than I am,” was his standard parting shot — cold comfort to a 7-year-old coming from an obese septuagenarian with a permanent patchy rash on the back of his neck. What my parents liked best about Dr. DiCarlo, however, was his standard charge of $3 for office visits, though his fee skyrocketed to $5 if he had to wheeze his way up the six flights of stairs to our apartment a few blocks away. I was enormously impressed by the wad of bills he would pull out of his side pocket after he was paid, but the great majority of them must have been singles.

As I later discovered, Dr. Pasquale DiCarlo was a generous, modest, hardworking man who devoted his life to the care of his less fortunate compatriots as the physician of the mutual assistance society for immigrants from my parents’ southern Italian hometown. He had tried to retire at 65 but soon returned to work and kept practicing until a few years before he died in his 80s. Considering how scared I once was of him, it’s ironic that, of all the many doctors I’ve had in the decades since then, old Dr. DiCarlo is the one I’d most like to spend an idle hour chatting with.