Temple University School of Medicine - Skull Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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A Finally, you will have obligations to yourselves. Every man in his youth forms an ideal profile of himself or of what he wants to be. He envisions, while young, an ideal program of things to do in life. The rest of his life is spent trying to fill in that profile with achievements. Some fail to reach fulfillment, and later it is tragic to see that ideal profile, of which they dreamed during their youth, in ruins, with the stumps of things begun but never completed. But in the majority of cases, that ideal silhouette created in youthful days really represents our true selves. You must live to be worthy of that silhouette. Your life, your work, and your personality as a physician must be such that your ideal profile of yourself will be filled in with brilliant achievements. Loam tO live perceptively, using that key to wisdom that comes from seeing everything with a total perspective and in view of eternity. Learn through science to correlate things in space, through history, to correlate events in time, and combine all this knowledge esthetically through the beauty of art. Remember that the important thing in life is to be great, HOt big, a great man, not a big man. Let your actions be great, but preserve your personal modesty and humility. What counts in a man and in a physician is his greatness. By greatness I mean grandeur in the things we do and Simplicity in the way we do them, doing things that influence the lives of many people, but preserving always the greatest personal simplicity. For greatness is simplicity. Try to find out as soon as you can what your ideal self is. You have chosen the best destiny of all, a life of dedicated service and dynamic activity. If you work with faith and without dismay, all your dreams will come true. In your future work you will be in good COinpOJiy, the great physicians of history, the glorious figures of the past, will always be near you. When you perform a dissection, a red-bearded young man with flashing eyes, Andreas Vesalius, will be peering over your shoulder; when you make a physiological experiment, the melancholy, pensive eyes of William Harvey will be watching you; when you teach medicine, the venerable figure of William Osier with his Apollonian head will come and sit like a medical Goethe beside you; and when you approach the sickbed, the shades of Hippocrates, Sydenham, and Fleming will gather round to counsel you. The Greeks created the legend that Delphi, site of the famous oracle, was the center of the world, because if two eagles were to fly from any two points of the globe, sooner or later they would meet in Delphi. We now know that the two eagles of science and medicine do not fly only in space but also in time, and their wings hover over the illustrious shadows of the investigators, clinicians, €(llIC£LtOrS, pioneers, rebels, £111(1 ITiart TS of the history of medicine. The meeting place of those two eagles lies not in space but in time, in the future, and in the mind and the heart of every one you w to greatness when you decide to be a doctor. J io answered destiny's cal Felix Marti-lbanez, M.D. v 2008 SKULL 25

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To Be A Doctor... Ever since the day you first said those magic words, “I Want to be a doctor,” you have been wrapped in the colorful fabric of the history of medicine, a fabric woven from the ideals, wisdom, endeavors, and achievements of our glorious predecessors in medicine. The original meaning of the three words- physician, medic, doctor- that describe our profession is highly illuminating. The word physician derives from the Greek physis or nature, denoting that the physician has his roots in an understanding of the nature of the things; the word medic comes from mederi, to heal, and the root med means to meditate or think, so that medic is equivalent to thinker and healer; the word doctor originally meant master, instructor. Thus, semantically, our profession involves learning, knowledge, healing, and teaching. Five types of ethical duties must guide your life: duties to your teachers, to society, to your patients, to your colleagues, and to yourselves. You have duties to your teachers, because they, the parents of VOlir mind, are the most important people in your life next to your own parents. I do not mean only your university professors, but any physician from who you learn anything- his science, art, ethics, self-denial, or example- that may become a source of inspiration in your professional life. You must honor your masters with devotion and friendship, for friendship is mail’s noblest sentiment, greater even than love. Your duty to society is to be idealists, not hedonists: as physicians, to accept your profession as a service to mankind, not as a source of profit; as investigators, to seek the knowledge that will benefit your fellow beings; as clinicians, to alleviate pain and heal the sick; as teachers, to share and spread your knowledge and always because you are imbued with an ideal of service and not the ambition for gain. Thus will you maintain the dignity of our profession as a social science applied to the welfare of mankind. Your duty to your patients will be to act toward them as you would wish them to act toward you: With kindness, with courtesy, with honesty. You must learn when and howto withhold the truth from your patients if by not telling them all the facts of the case you can relieve or console them, for you can cure them sometimes, and you can give them relief often, but hope you can give them always. Remember that a laboratory report is not an irrevocable sentence. A hematological determination, a roentgenogram, an electroen-cephalophagram may supply vital information on the organic working of the body, but it is even more vital never to forget that, behind all such reports and data, there is a human being in pain and anguish, to whom you must offer something more than an antibiotic, an injection, or a surgical aid; you must, with your attitude, your words, and your actions, inspire confidence and faith and give understanding and consolation. To your colleagues, you have the obligations of civilized men sharing a great and noble task and fighting for a common cause in a great crusade. YOU belong to a team of gallant professionals of all races and eras, bound together across the ages and continents bv a glorious ideal. 24 TEMPLE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

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