Managing a clinic for immigrants and the indigent at New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, Dr. Parag Mehta explains a grim prognosis to a Spanish-speaking patient. An internist and attending physician, or teacher, Mehta follows in the footsteps of Indian healers who established medical schools on the Subcontinent more than a century before the Greek physician Hippocrates. Beginning in 1965, South Asian doctors were recruited to fulfill Medicare's promise of free health care for the elderly, but today they find it difficult to stay in the United States unless they work in poor or rural areas after completing specialist training.