Betrayed by the Tribune?
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” the journalist Janet Malcolm asserted famously. She would have been right if this were a child’s world in which only things that are morally pure can be morally defended. Because this world is not, she sounded silly.
Reporters Bonita Brodt and Maurice Possley spent 13 days in Pirruccello’s clinic asking questions, taking notes, speaking to the stream of indigent patients. Brodt tells us the tenor of her questions was unmistakable; she was challenging Pirruccello to defend lapses from acceptable medical practice. And yet somehow he didn’t see what was coming.
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Pirruccello was portrayed as an amiable but slipshod practitioner who freely prescribed drugs he knew little about, allowed his lab technician to diagnose and order tests, and often examined patients just by looking at them standing there with their clothes on. “I’m just a plastic surgeon,” he told the Tribune.
“My father is not a person who talks in a guarded fashion. He’s a well-known kidder. And what they did–they would take statements from him that we all know were jokes. Like, ‘I’m just a plastic surgeon.’ It’s out of context. It’s kidding. And it should have been, ‘”I’m just a plastic surgeon,” he joked.’ He had had extensive general-practice experience.”
“He was a very, very kind person,” says Sullivan. “He was interested in a lot of different things. He even lent me some books on philosophy.” She also remembers that his hands trembled slightly as he operated, and she wondered if he’d become too old to be a surgeon. When she read the article on the Cottage Grove clinic “I found it very, very sad. If I had not known the man it would have made me angry. But because I knew him this was superceded by a sadness.”
“I’m not sure that it mattered,” Brodt said. “What mattered was what he was doing. He was working as a medicaid doctor. What you’re asking me is much like whether you should ask about the previous sexual history of a rape victim on the witness stand. It doesn’t matter. She was raped. It seems to me you’re asking me to excuse doctors because of who they were or what they were, and that’s ridiculous.”
The Near North News disclosed that Michigan Avenue is about to become a one-way street. “Circulator would make Michigan, State 1-way,” said the shocking headline, and the story explained that when the trolley’s built “Michigan av. would become 1-way north between Grand and Walton.”
