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

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TEMPLE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE CLASS OF 2009 TEMPLE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

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2009 SKULL 25 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 by a glorious ideal. 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 sec 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. Learn 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 csthetically through the beauty of art. Remember that the important thing in life is to be great, not 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 company, 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, educators, pioneers, rebels, and martyrs 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 who answered destiny's cal to greatness when you decide to be a doctor. Felix Marti-Ibanez, M.D.

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2009 SKULL CLASS OF 2009