THE LEAST OF THESE MY BRETHREN

A doctor with a conscience celebrates the preciousness of all human life in grim stories of death and dying among society's outcasts. The site of these graphic accounts is one 17-bed unit at the Spellman Center for HIV Related Diseases at New York City's St. Clare's Hospital. For over three years Baxter was a physician at this ``improbable crucible of despair and hope,'' treating paroled rapists, homeless alcoholics, drug addicts, and drag queens under third-world conditions—cockroaches and rodents in filthy rooms where ceilings seem always to be crumbling and the plumbing doesn't work; doctors in other parts of the hospital refuse Baxter's requests for consultations with his patients. He describes his typical workday with its multiple frustrations and seemingly insoluble problems, and the routine of Sister Pascal Comforti, director of pastoral care, whose problems with patients and their often fragmented families seem even more difficult than the author's. He presents dignified, compassionate portraits of patients (with names changed), including foul-mouthed Rosa, found comatose and half-naked in a subway tunnel; Sarah, who has sex in the hospital stairwells and smokes crack in the linen closets; Todd, a partial transsexual who refuses a needed medical procedure that he fears would mar his beautiful breasts; and demented Enrique, an ex-prisoner with both tuberculosis and AIDS. Baxter takes his title from Matthew 25:40, in which Jesus says to the righteous: ``Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.'' These words explain for Baxter why caring for such people is so necessary. Among the lessons he draws from his patients is that we are all living on borrowed time, and that if the ``least of these'' can face death without fear, so can we. Intended to inspire, this powerful book succeeds more often in shocking and angering the reader at the harrowing conditions to which these patients are subjected.