![]() ![]() It also has a lot to say about incompetent doctors, malpractice suits and other medical issues that were toned down for a romantic comedy movie. The book, which has been renamed for the movie and re-released with Fox’s picture on the cover, is very funny. (The book was ghostwritten by then Emory student and now Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiassen.) Last month, after years of show-biz machinations and seven screenplay rewrites, it hit the screen as Doc Hollywood. Again?, a novel published to mild acclaim in 1979. He wrote down funny things that really happened and funny stories he picked up, then adapted his own career – a six-month commitment that never ended – into the theme of getting seduced into finding happiness as a doctor in the boonies. Shulman once traveled cross-country sleeping in emergency rooms and looking for a job, then spent a few years moonlighting in small-town hospitals. hospitals, where they are treated free.īut all this serious stuff never lost its lighter side. Shulman’s experiences in Africa led to one of his current favorite projects, a charity called Heart to Heart that brings African children with heart defects to U.S. His long list of research projects and papers includes such unfunny topics as “The effect of anti-hypertensive drug treatment on mortality in the presence of resting electrocardiographic abnormalities at baseline.” He helped found and now heads the International Society on Hypertension in Blacks, spearheaded hypertension education and screening programs, co-wrote two books on the subject and chaired a conference in Kenya to extend the research to Africa. Shulman still works at Grady Memorial and is an associate professor at Emory’s medical school. One thing led to another, and they have added up to an 18-page resume. “One of my professors said, ‘How can you leave now? You really should stay awhile.’ I gave myself six months.” His specialty was kidneys, but never mind. But some federal grant money came down the pipeline that would help the clinics – if they also conducted research into hypertension, or high blood pressure, a major health problem among blacks. He wanted to travel the world practicing medicine and writing down more funny things. Shulman helped set up health clinics in Atlanta’s inner city, but didn’t plan to stay. This country is too rich for people to be dying because they can’t afford their medicine.” There’s a real problem in getting affordable medicine for low-income people. “I was pretty aghast at the enormous problems these people had. “I developed a bit of a placard-carrying reputation about getting health care to underserved people,” he says. ![]() Meanwhile, back in the real world, he served his internship and residency at Grady Memorial Hospital, an inner-city hospital in Atlanta where he learned a lot more than medicine. It wasn’t a best seller, but Shulman answered enough questions and appeared on enough talk shows to realize that he could make people laugh – and that he liked it. ![]() Grandma became a character in Finally, I’m a Doctor, a largely autobiographical novel that begins in high school and ends as the title indicates. Instead of watching television to escape the pressures of Atlanta’s Emory University School of Medicine, he wrote down funny things. “She was such a funny character that I wanted to write about her.” “She was the big stimulus,” says Shulman, who grew up in Washington, D.C. Grandma was brash and funny, played family matchmaker and investment manager,wrote jokes to be included in her eulogy, introduced her grandson as a doctor long before any university concurred. Give the credit, or the blame, to Grandma Anna, who left Russia at age 10 and met her future husband on the boat coming to America. Fox does all those things in the hit movie Doc Hollywood, and Neil Shulman, M.D., is the real Doc Hollywood. Never mind that he never wanted to be a plastic surgeon, never was a smug yuppie with a Porsche, never got stuck at a small-town hospital, never even adopted a pig. But all of a sudden, he’s getting noticed far beyond his base in Atlanta. ![]()
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