Dr. Allan Friedman is a meticulous neurosurgeon who abides by only the strictest rituals. He runs the trail at the Washington Duke Inn three times a week and on Fridays, he loops twice. He does not mind the scorching humidity of early June, because that's when the smell of honeysuckle is most intoxicating. He watches women's basketball games from the front row under the Duke basket and mentors female athletes interested in medicine through a program he co-directs with another top neurosurgeon, Dr. Henry Friedman (no relation). He leads a biweekly, Socratic discussion for first-year medical students called "brain school." He enjoys poetry and has a copy of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" on the corkboard behind his desk; he can even recite by memory the first, oft-quoted line.

Friedman operates three or four times a week, and he repeats the same process every time. He reviews the X-rays for his next day's cases the night before and simulates the operations in his head. He considers the potential pitfalls and pauses at the trickiest parts. The routine June 2 was no different. He met with the patient for about an hour Sunday to explain the course of action, informing him and his family that there was a chance he could end up a "whole lot worse than when he came in," as Friedman says. Then he studied the looming procedure Sunday night, slept for seven hours, woke up Monday morning, drove to work at Duke University Hospital and removed a malignant tumor from the brain of Sen. Edward Kennedy.

By 3 p.m., Kennedy had told his wife, Vicki, that he felt like a million bucks. Sometime during the three and a half hour operation, Friedman had not only saved Kennedy's life, but realized just who was on his table. "What crossed my mind was, I'm operating on this guy, and I'm not doing different at all. I'm just doing regular. I said, 'Yep, that's true.' And I continued the operation," he says in his first interview since he picked the mind of the most famous and influential Democratic senator this side of 2,117 pledged delegates.

Weeks later, he has a stack of printed e-mails from the Massachusetts First Family under his desk-the Kennedy pile, he calls it. Friedman, after all, isn't the type of doctor to take off his surgical mask and never again speak with the man whose brain he just saw. He still operates frequently because he enjoys the rapport with patients-that, and he benefits from so many referrals. It's obvious that he treats Kennedy the same way he treated Reynolds Price after he removed a malignant tumor from his spine in 1984.

The senator's decision to travel to North Carolina-rather than stay at Mass General or see a hotshot from Harvard-was a vote of confidence for Duke, and the fact that the venerable politician is already sailing on Cape Cod mornings will do wonders for the hospital's prestige. But it was just another day for Friedman, who released a brief statement and denied interview requests from every major newspaper and morning show, partly because of the medical code of patient confidentiality, partly because of his own sturdy set of ethics. Maybe it was a career highlight and maybe it wasn't, but Friedman did not not think of Kennedy like the VIP that he was. "I think if you treat it otherwise, it's a real mistake. I think you would do a less good job," Friedman says. "The idea is to go in there and not say, 'Oh my God, I'm operating on Senator Kennedy,' but to say, 'This is the patient, and I just need to make it a perfect operation.'"

Which, of course, he did. So what comes next? The expansion of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Brain Tumors to include surgeons in the hospital's branch in Raleigh, for one. Then there's more basketball and football games, and staying on the cutting edge of research. Ho-hum. "You're kind of late for me," he says in response to his selection in these pages. "You should have watched me 20 years ago!" Had we but world enough, and time.

-Ben Cohen