Columbia University School of Dental and Oral Surgery - Dental Columbian Yearbook (New York, NY)

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Doctor, would you check this out for me? Rinse, please — - Stimulate Bleeding 1 . fa. (k How about giving him an inlay!

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Seniors

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Senior Class History Alas! how swift the moments fly! How flash the years along! Scarce here, yet gone already by, The burden of a song JOHN QUINCY ADAMS The days, nay the weeks, often appeared to move by at an all but imperceptible snail ' s pace — but in retrospect, one realizes that the past four years, considered as an entity, have indeed sped by at a greyhound ' s clip. It is not the dictates of custom that seems to pre-determine the nostalgic nature of this section — it is rather a somewhat im- ponderable but eminently real desire to review, and even relive, a past segment of our existence before initiating a new phase. Hence, at the cul- mination of our professional training we feel no one would begrudge us the luxury of a few pages of reverie. As we disengage ourselves from reality, we find our minds straining to reconstruct an image of a perfectly ordinary September day in 1951. Slowly the haze dispels and we see it all with surprising clarity. Instantaneously, an alert, confident, and cocky group of college graduates was reduced to a hesitant, wide-eyed, and insecure freshman class. The first year was spent in solitary confinement on the ninth floor — a diet of anatomy (gross, microscopic, neuro, oral, and embryology) sub- stituted for bread and water. Gross anatomy was our first imposing hurdle — after months of diligent dissection, the foreboding final exam came upon us — if only we had known in advance that writing the questions in the proper exam booklet was suf- ficient basis for a passing grade! Remember the frantic pace of the histology lectures — catastrophe was an ever-present potential — a dropped pencil in the amphitheater resulting in a classmate ' s future inability to distinguish a fallopian tube from a seminiferous tubule. How about those dreaded modern art quizzes! Each and every section of the central nervous system in neuroanatomy resembled an abstract pencil sketch. Embryology taught us one fundamental biological principle — salamanders can definitely be bred with cephalic pedal extrem- ities. We struggled with physiology, biochemistry, oral histology, and with apologies to the human- ities, dental history until we reached our first tech- nic course — dental anatomy. Here we became fa- miliar with the neophyte ' s guillotine — that awe- some weapon of total destruction — the Boley gauge. This was also our basic training ground for the sophomore debacle, becoming familiar with such basic commands as too convex, do it over — too concave, do it over — too narrow, do it over — not to mention do it over for the intrinsic value of the phrase alone. The sophomore year began with the exhilarating feeling of being able to walk into the elevator and say, eight, please. The generally held feeling was that the year might be difficult but nothing could be as impossible as rumors would have us believe. The harbinger of despair and frustration came upon us quickly in the form of our sophomore kits — 4,397 items and we were familiar with nothing but plasticine. Bacteriology enabled us to see the wisdom of a student health fee — autoinoculations, 25