Joseph I. Kramer, who served as “country doctor” to the poor on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for three decades, died August 30 at his home in Leonia, NJ. He was 96.

Dr. Kramer had been a practicing pediatrician in a prosperous New Jersey suburb, but found it unfulfilling, he had said. He began working on the Lower East Side, where he had been born, and in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where he had grown up. He set up a practice on Avenue D, where he saw children with herpes of the brain, active tuberculosis lesions, or wounds from being pricked in the park by discarded hypodermic needles. He evolved from a pediatrician into a general practitioner, treating prostitutes, priests and bookies in addition to families. His office was in a converted ground floor apartment in the Jacob Riis housing project, seeing up to 40 patients a day. He often paid for the medicines he prescribed and for the treatments he recommended. 

After he retired, he attended a reunion of Lower East Side old-timers at East River Park. Hundreds of people would swarm around him. “He was every child in the hood’s doctor,” one former patient recalled. “I don’t know how he managed that, but he saw every one of us.”