DOCTORS HAD DEEP VOICES and hair on the backs of their hands. When he passed an apartment with its door ajar and heard a deep voice he knew it was a doctor, hand on knob, ready to leave, giving final advice. His mother talked a lot about doctors. Her favorite was their pediatrician, who she claimed had saved his brother’s life when his brother was an infant by replacing a formula prescribed by another doctor with whole milk, on which his brother thrived. This pediatrician was gruff with him and pleasant to his mother. In the pediatrician’s office the nurse would tell him to take off all his clothes except his socks. She would weigh and measure him and put him on the edge of a cold, leather examining table to wait. When the doctor arrived his mother would tell how he had eaten, slept, moved his bowels, breathed, played, and felt since his last visit. The doctor would tap his knee, look up his nose, down his throat, into his ears and eyes, and lift his testicles while he coughed and sweat rolled from his armpits over his ribs. One day when he was seven the doctor told him to remove his right sock, pricked his big toe, and touched a piece of glass to the spot of blood. That evening his father brought him home a new bathrobe. The next morning his mother packed it in a case with a pair of pajamas. They were going to the hospital, she said, so the doctor could look at the toe. He became suspicious when he saw his father waiting for them at the hospital, and he was panicked when he was made to change into his pajamas. It took two male attendants and three nurses to get him onto the operating table. When he woke they gave him vanilla ice cream and told him that his tonsils had been removed. Five years later he had acute appendicitis and was so sick he hardly cared what happened to him. As a nurse was shaving his stomach and the surgeon looked on he asked the surgeon the death rate in appendectomies. One in fifty, the surgeon said; this seemed an acceptable risk, and he proposed a deal: he would not struggle on the table if the surgeon would not restrain him. The surgeon agreed, and they both kept their word, although as he was breathing the anesthetic he changed his mind but found that his arms were numb. One day in his office when he was thirty his heart began to pound; he thought he was having a heart attack and took a taxi home. His family doctor assured him that nothing was wrong; he went to a heart specialist, who said the same thing. He told the heart specialist that he was sure he was going to die and that the heart specialist was lying to save him anguish in his last days. The heart specialist sent him to a psychiatrist, who looked like his brother and in the subsequent five years of treatment said very little. He tried to engage the psychiatrist in arguments on public and private matters, insulted the psychiatrist, occasionally gave the psychiatrist presents, pointed out inconsistencies in the few things the psychiatrist said, but never elicited much response. If he told a joke the psychiatrist smiled; if he laughed the psychiatrist laughed. One day after recounting a sexual fantasy he accused the psychiatrist of blushing. “I’m not blushing,” the psychiatrist said, “you are”; and indeed his face was burning. On one visit the psychiatrist took notes, something the psychiatrist had not done since the initial interview years before. Sarcastically he asked if the psychiatrist was drawing his picture. “Why do you think I’m drawing your picture?” the psychiatrist said, and he understood in a new way that psychiatry could be a serious business. The most valuable lesson of the treatment came from the psychiatrist’s silence: one did not have to talk; one could listen, and others didn’t mind. He still regularly sees the heart specialist, who takes his blood pressure, listens to his chest, and chats with him for half an hour. The heart specialist will age, wander in his talk, and never find anything wrong with him. Guiltily he will visit another doctor, younger than himself, explain that he wants to continue seeing the heart specialist but also wants scientific care. The new doctor will say, “But you are going to him for his sake, not yours.” He will nod. “Well, if that’s what you want.” This will be the first of a series of doctors younger than himself, and when the heart specialist retires he will realize that the appeal of having a doctor older than oneself is the appeal of having an expert between oneself and death.