Columbia University College of Pharmacy - Apothekan Yearbook (New York, NY)

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an excellent lecturer, und what we learned from hie was almost adequate for all four years of Pharmacy. Professor Amsterdam, the-man-with-the- Billion-dollar-personality, supervised our lab work and expostulated the two fundamental principles of Pharmpcyj 1. add wuter and «.. boil. Professor Amsterdam also lectured in Metrology, also called The Study of Wastes and Measures. We were fined, according to e system we reluctantly agreed on, one cent for each error we made in class recita- tion, end the proceeds were to buy some treat for the entire class. Be fore we could spend it, the class treasurer and the $ 1.5 2 irere both at Camp Upton. Dr. Winner ' s course, Pharmacy Orientation, was just a one hour a week lecture on the evolution of Pharmacy from the Ebers Papyrus to the Cut-Rate Drug Store. Everyone who fathomed Dr. Winner ' s wit, and wasn ' t asleep after an important joke, automatically passed. General Inorganic Chemistry proved pleasant for those who didn ' t succumb to the gases. The formation of green precipitates left us deep in ecstasy and the evolution of HgS was simply out of this world, liich patience was shown by Mr. Anzelai, but he showed too much understanding when all but one of the reports handed in were identical except for the name of the owners. (We still don ' t know who the traitor was). After our first year of learning the fine points of table tennis from the more expert upperdassmen, we tackled the Sophomore Year, and found it more preponderous than expected. It took a long time to become accustomed to the daily treks up to the fifth and sixth floors. For the first time we realised what an F signified, and the difference exist- ing between the red and blue varieties. Kc accumulated so many F ' s that we forgot there was more to the alphabet. Elementary German could not be called difficult, but hitler him- self should only have heard the pronunciations of some of the students. Herr Ingenhuett tried to get us to say ich properly, but the hiccups forced us to render it n ik. It. Ingenhuett ' s mind must have been away at lunch during class, for frequently he would smack his lips. German was a very handy class to eat lunch in, for it was uzmoticeable when we recited with a mouth full of food. Latin, which is a dead language, almost dragged us along with it to the grave. The A ' s we occasionally received helped us stagger on- ward to the final exams. The subject had many of its hilarious moments, some of them afforded by the slapstick-like stumbling of Dr. Brown upon the base of the blackboard in room 53. Often Dr. Brown made some slight mistake in transferring matter from the textbook to the blackboard, and half an hour of debate was usually necessary to correct it. Dr. Brown also taught us the meaning of S.A. in Dispensing Phar- macy I. We made enough pills, troches, and suppositories to win an Army Navy E . An excellent machine helped us to turn out unlimited numbers of perfect troches, but we weren ' t able to make a cold-mold for suppos- itories. Within five years after graduation, we ' ll set up a factory for making all the suppositories that Dr. Brown can use. Incidentally, it ' s been heard that he is heading a campaign for the more widespread appli- cation of the rectal kind.

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Professor Pokorny, the dapper young educator with an office sit- uated on the fourth floor, was assigned the impossible task of teaching us botany. It was only natural that we picked up a little about the bee and bird activities on the side. The expedition to nearby Central Park revealed the wealth of beauty which abounded amiast steel and concrete. Banjoeyes kept us happy with his clever blackboard illustrations, one of the best of which was the Story of the Insectivorous Plant. The Pro- fessor woul d start off by drawing the unsuspecting insect climbing into the flov.er; then the insect would be portrayed as intoxicated, and thus would fint-lly find himself unable to stagger hone to his wife and seven larvae, entrapped by hi6 o.vn impulsive folly. Ah, what a touching moral to be derived froa this instance of insect versus jlant. The laboratory work in Botany was fairly simple j one look through the microscope, one look at an illustration in the textbook, and one look at what somebody else was sketching, were all that was necessary before a group of three could turn out satisfactory drawings. Zoology lab q ' lickly replaced botany, md proved to be nn equally suitable pl ce for lab oratory. H. Randolph Halsey, the director of the butcher shop, used « different pipe for every day in the semester, a nd his fondness for the cultivated week was evidenced by a throat-clearing roar after every fourth sentence of a 1-cture. His non-committal basso profundo uh-huh, with emphasis on the second syllable, was the char- acteristic response to a student ' s complaints or observations. Tte soon accustomed ourselves to the instructor ' s quaint peculiarities, and also to the gory lab work. After mangling a frog, and then a lobster, we got to the point where it became a perfectly naturel custom to devour lunch without gastric mishap while dissecting an oversized pickled cockroach. Say, do you know Sam? Tihy, he was one of the best chem teachers we ever had mo.de the acquaintance of. Still, as a means of maintaining chemical pence, equipment waa •tewed away in lookers as soon ;s Sam ap- peared within a twenty -foot radius, and mass emigration to the balance- room or the hood began instantaneously. Stragglers ruickly emptied all test tubes, turned off all Bunsens, and started washing even the clean- est equipment. But don ' t get the wrong impression. He thought fondly of Professor Lib erman, even though just one studied look from him did make us slash our wrists tdth b broken beaker. He merely endeavored to avoid the inevitable question: Do you know Tfftp.t you ' re doing? the answer to which would have caused a rapid depopulation of the realm of chemistry. It is probable, to say the least, that the master wouldn ' t have approv- ed our side experiments, such as the manufacture of synthetic meatballs from ferric hydroxide, or the technique of vaporizing solutions to dry- ness in a Gooch crucible. Sam never did get over his feeling of impend- ing danger after one wit put nine drops each of hydrochloric, sulfuric, and nitric acids on a crucible cover, heated it to 350° Centigrade, and then waved the fuming liquid overhead in the laboratory to imitate sky- writing. As if he didn ' t care pny more about living, ( and no with thor- oughly destroyed nasal mucosa), Professor Liberman permitted us to take iuantitative Inorganic Analysis. After spending et least three weeks on calibrating our weights, and le rnint; the differences between a balf.nce and a scale, we were subjected to the principal principles of gravimet- ric analysis. It was fortunate for us that simultaneously the peculir.r havits end customs of the gremlins Tre.re studied in eneively. The grem- lins, and their cousins, the chemlins, provided the only logic;! answer for our getting results which had an tverage devit tion of t proximately