United We Fall

drawing by Suzanne Dunaway

Doctors have professional organizations in both Italy and the US, but their purposes are light-years apart. Where the American Medical Association is basically a lobbyist for doctors, the equivalent on this side of the Atlantic, the Ordine dei Medici, is more like a police force. I’ve visited their Rome office exactly five times, and I remember every one:

 1)    In 1979, to find out how to get my American internal medicine specialty recognized. That didn’t take long: “You can’t.”

2)    In 1998, to peddle an old pulmonary function testing machine by tacking up a For Sale notice on the Ordine’s cork bulletin board. No buyers materialized, but some employee with nothing better to do noticed the words “Diplomate, American Board of Internal Medicine” on my letterhead, and sent me a registered letter enjoining me to remove them. Turns out you’re not allowed to mention foreign specializations. I took the appropriate action for any old Italy hand, i.e. I did nothing whatsoever. The ABIM is still on my letterhead – they never followed up.

3)    In 2004, to buy passes to drive into the center of Rome, a prerogative reserved for residents and for docs on house calls. We had always had free dashboard permits, but suddenly City Hall announced it would start charging for the privilege. I lined up at the Ordine dei Medici along with hundreds of other colleagues dumb enough to take the initiative seriously, forked over a 10 euro note that they said would be good for ten single entries, and received a receipt that stated the passes would come in the mail. Did any passes come in your mail? No? Well none arrived in mine either. Good thing I hadn’t thrown out my old dashboard permit.

4)    In 2005, to try putting my first Aventino Hill office on a more formal legal footing. My two partners and I partners trooped over to the Ordine for an hour-long briefing from their lawyer, taking careful notes on his advice. Fortunately we didn’t act on it – we learned later from unimpeachable sources that he had been wrong from A to Z.

5)    In 2010, to defend my second Aventino Hill office, soon after we moved in. Our neighbors sicced the Ordine on us, after sending around the Carabinieri, the Health Department, and the Lazio Region, as part of their unsuccessful campaign to kick us out of the building. (The one agency they never snitched to was the IRS – fearful of drawing attention to their own tax returns?) The Ordine called us in for interrogation, and then mailed a ten-point accusation in impenetrable legalese to which we promptly, humbly, and painstakingly replied. A year later, when we hadn’t heard back, we phoned to make sure they’d dropped the charges. No, they just hadn’t gotten around to looking at our letter yet. They finally did read it, and grant their absolution . . . in 2013.

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An Interview

I enjoyed answering Claudia Landini's queries about Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome, the book that, as you know, is coming out in just four months. You might like to check out her super questions and my attempts at answering them at her website, ExpatClic.

Home Sick In Rome

drawing by Suzanne Dunaway

After moving to Rome it didn’t take me long to figure out that my friends’ grandparents had all been either peasants or aristocrats, and that for the latter classes a doctor was expected, if illness struck, to come when called. Like in the 19th century, when they used the back entrance – the doctor was a tradesman, like a carpenter only cheaper. Read some short stories by Chekhov, whose day job was General Practitioner, and you’ll get the idea.

Once in the ‘90s, over dinner at an oak table on the high-ceiling piano nobile of a baroque palace, under an oil portrait of my hostess’s granddad, a new acquaintance tossed a spanner in the works of a previously pleasant conversation: “Do you make house calls?” Which led to twenty minutes of shifting uneasily in my seat while my highborn tablemates complained about how difficult it is nowadays to find a doctor willing to come to your place when you have a sore throat.

When Italians are ill their rest is sacrosanct. I’ve seen many a workplace dynamo relish the theatrics of the sick role, unashamed to hide under the covers safe from the menace of outdoor air. It’s easier, of course, when you have a right to six months of paid sick leave…

drawing by Suzanne Dunaway

I hear house calls have been making a small comeback in the States. They never went out here, though as the years have passed and I have reached do-not-disturb maturity fewer patients expect me to make one personally. One benefit is that setting up an elaborate sickroom in the home is a breeze. Laboratories are happy to send around a technician to draw blood, you can enlist your aunt or your portiere to give injections, some young doc will be willing to come and hang an intravenous drip if one is needed, and a radiologist will trot in with marvelous briefcases that open out into x-ray machines – in pre-digital days, they’d hang up the films over the bathtub to dry.

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