Musical M.D.s

The TV camera focused on a dignified-looking orchestra, high foreheads gleaming above the violins. Only unusual fact about the concert: most of the musicians were doctors. One of the outstanding amateur orchestras in the U.S., the Doctors' Orchestral Society of New York, was making its live TV debut.

The doctors' orchestra was organized in 1938, now numbers some 50 medical men, their relatives and a handful of professional musicians, including Conductor Maxim Waldo. There are no standard medical-musical tie-ups. Dentists play violins, cello, horn, bass. General practitioners play flutes and timpani, a dermatologist plays viola. The doctors prefer to remain anonymous to avoid publicity that might be contrary to medical ethics.

Making music seems to have a special appeal for doctors; there is a similar doctors' orchestra in Los Angeles, and doctors' chamber groups are innumerable. Says Ophthalmologist Alfred E. Mamelock (clarinet), president of the New York doctors' orchestra: "The taste for medicine and the taste for music are the same kind of thing. Medicine is an art as much as it is a science, if not more so."

During last week's TV concert (finale of Dvorak's "New World" symphony), the doctors played competently and with gusto. And, for once, the program was not interrupted by the sudden departure of one of the oboists--an obstetrician.

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