What a Gas

There are worse places to be than Dr. Michael Levitt’s waiting room. Chernobyl, for instance. Or Love Canal. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Levitt’s facilities themselves, you understand. Indeed, as doctor’s offices go, they’re better than most. There are no millennia-old copies of Travel & Leisure on the coffee table (A Weekend in Pangaea!), no sour balls from the mid-1950s in the receptionist’s candy dish, no relentless Muzak repetitions of The Girl From Ipanema. No, the problem with Dr. Levitt’s waiting room is Dr. Levitt’s patients. Michael Levitt is a gastroen-terologist working at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis. The term gastroenterology, of course, refers to the branch of medicine that treats ailments of the stomach and bowels and comes from the Greek gaster, for belly, and enterology, for someone who really ought to wash his hands before making you a sandwich. For a medical specialty high ...