The son of a disenfranchised janitor turned chief of medicine at a New York City hospital Lester Sloan had no choice but to follow in his fathers foot steps. This act of nepotism would not only define Lester’s life but also deprive it of any real meaning. The idea of practicing medicine does not appeal to him but he enjoys the money and prestige as well as the idea that if someone shouts “Is there a doctor in the house?” He can keep quiet and watch a man die of auto-erotic asphyxiation, knowing full well that he is essentially committing murder by not acting. This scenario has never presented itself but it is a fantasy of Lester’s.
Lester has a lot of fantasy’s because he does not care for his job, and spends a lot of down time with a snifter of scotch in one hand a cigarette in another. His ultimate fantasy involves him as a South American Rubber Barron lying on the beach in Rio, with the natives spoon feeding him Baked Alaska in the nude while he does lines of coke off a toucan's beak.
In general Lester becomes annoyed around people, especially his patients that don’t seem to appreciate how intelligent he is. This is aggravated when he is around people that are not sufficiently impressed by the fact that he attended Harvard Medical School. He assumes that everyone else he meets in an ignoramus, unless they also attended an Ivy League university, with the exception of Brown and Cornell, which he considers to be the bastard schools of Academia. Anytime someone tells him something he knows he always says “I already knew that” with as much as contempt as possible in order to degrade any co-workers, family members, patients or bystanders with whom he interacts.
Lester sees himself as charming and handsome, and this is only reinforced by the fact that he is a rich successful doctor, however his sleazy abrasive personality accompanied by the fact that he is constantly correcting people and reinforcing his superior intelligence prevents him from having any lasting or meaningful relationships. Furthermore if he ever did find a person who was an intellectual equal he would be so threatened by this he would undergo a nervous breakdown. In his ideal world the would simply be completely subservient to him and his genius while he does coke on the beach
