Jenyons and Ashton, who is in her third year as an obstetrics resident, check the hospital's patient board (above). Later (below), Jenyons discusses the ultrasound reading for a 37-week fetus with Moon.

Lee's stethoscope (below) is decorated with jewelry in the shape of a gourd. Dried hollow gourds are used in China to hold medicine. She values the charm partly as a means to distract children and partly "for good luck or good karma, and a wish that everybody will be well." More than 90 percent of her patients are Chinese. She says that "even if everybody speaks perfect English, they want me to speak Chinese. It's just more comfortable." But though Chinese is her own native language, Lee says she still needs a Chinese-English dictionary because "I'm U.S.-born, and I studied all Western stuff. Sometimes I don't know how to say 'immunoglobulin'" in Chinese. She's not trained in the use of medicinal herbs but acknowledges that many Chinese families use them. She warns against ones she knows to be potentially harmful—those that may be contaminated with poisons like lead, mercury, and arsenic, for example.

Lee has what she calls "a tradition" of hiring high-school students. They begin in 10th grade and stay until they graduate, helping out as receptionists, clerical workers, and medical assistants. Above, Xiao Lee, a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School, helps Lee update a chart as (from the left) Queenie Cheung, Marie Liao, and Amy Lee look on (neither Lee is a relation). Two of Lee's former high-school workers are now in medical school, one became a physician assistant, and several are in nursing school.

Jenyons settles in for a long night at the hospital. She and the residents get to choose their dinner from a spectrum of cuisines available in the neighborhood—Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican. Jenyons is treating them tonight (top).

Jenyons is also planning a prenatal program for St. Luke's that will reach out to Spanish- speaking women, including those without insurance. Her focus will be education: "about health, about taking care of themselves, about not waiting for a problem to occur but preventing it from occurring." She'll share information with patients about weight control, nutrition, diabetes, high blood pressure, and exercise. "If you can empower women about good health practices, you've got the whole family," she says.

Lee (above) draws some blood from toddler Bryce Garey with help from her husband, while Bryce's mother, Christine Liu, comforts her unhappy son.

But most of her young patients, says Lee, "look forward to coming to see me. They tell me where their ouchies are. It's a chance to get very individualized attention."

From the residents' lounge at Roosevelt, Jenyons can look westward across 10th Avenue to the Hudson River and New Jersey, home for her and her husband, economist Rafael Escano. Jenyons's mother, Maria, lives with them, along with sons Ruben, 14, and Ivan, 12. Their oldest, 21-year-old Oscar, began college this fall after serving for three years in the Army (including a tour in Afghanistan).

Lee has customarily worked a short day on Thursdays to make time for her own children, sons Clement and Clinton. Now, they're both away at college, so Lee uses her spare time to go to the gym or to run (she completed half of the 2002 New York Marathon). The Lees recently moved from New Jersey to Queens.

Nearly 25 years after Lee and Jenyons last connected, while they were still students at Dartmouth Medical School, they are reunited (above) on a New York street corner. They recognize each other and then enjoy a meal together at a Dominican restaurant near Jenyons's uptown office (below): fish cooked in coconut milk, and arroz con pollo (chicken with rice). They agree that Dartmouth encouraged its graduates to consider careers in primary care and embraced unconventional students. "They didn't want to choose all standard-issue people," recalls Lee.