Drexel University College of Medicine - Medic Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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nomenclature, Dr. Amenta with his daily ioke session, and Dr. Chunn's barehanded dissections will be forever with us. Practical exams were stimulating and we began to feel that anomalies were more frequent than the normal And who could live down the ignominy of missing a tagged structure on our own cadaver. Months passed as we systematically dismembered the cadavers. We had all the advantages that science could offer, red nerves, blue arteries, uniniected veins. Gross lab was always with us, foods had the added seasoning of cadaver juice. Recognizing our classmates became in- creasingly easy - all we had to do was get within 3 feet of them. Most of us began to develop better night vision or got no notes at all in many lectures. . . , thus amidst the rattling bone boxes, endless mnemonics, gory cross- sections, midnight labs and lseeminglyl 5 sec. buzzers in practical exams, we laid the foundation upon which we could build our future in medicine. EMBRYOLOGY developed so rapidly that we were into the blostocoele and out the anal pore before we knew what happened . . . Somite as well forget itll HISTOLOGY introduced us to the wonders of the cellular world, with its karyosome, mitochondria, reticulor fibers and nissle's bodies. It was the safety valve of the first semester and helped us to preserve what little sanity was left. Our sketching was interrupted occasionally by the sound of a B box crashing to the floor, a smoke in the corridor, or a trip to OR. A or D to be greatly impressed by a surgical procedure we could hardly see. Charlie lipton's glasses were aways so steamed up that he always saw more through the microscope than the rest of us. Dr. Perlmutter, lthe histology professors' histology professor and friend to the friendlessl won acclaim as the teacher of the year. l-le had mas- tered the art of showing us that we could be right and wrong simul- taneously la not too infrequent occurrence in medicinel. Dr. Van Dyke's classic descriptions of tissues le.g., - liver: marshmallows in chicken wirel lent strength to the rumors that he was taking LSD. He was every- where patiently explaining what normal looked like. And surprisingly enough, when we got to Pathology, we knew the difference between liver and spleen... By the way . . . who drew the lines labeling the structures in the exam- ination on the gingiva and teeth? And who said that l-lilton's White Line was a chain of segregated hotels? NEUROANATOMY was brain wracking. lf Barnum 81 Bailey ever chose to add a medical side show to their circus, it would surely include Dr. Truex's lecture on the Sth Cranial Nerve. Spasticity gave way to sheer terror as lll little buggers sat stunned while the Mighty Midget would draw, explain and erase the lateral Corticospinal tract faster than it took a motor impuse to traverse it, Our Betz cells strained to the utmost, were hydropically degenerated and become overgrown by microglia in the face of the terrifying onslaught. Who will ever forget our field trip to l'Uncle l?ay's Zoo lThe Mills Buildingl, or Dr. Perlmutter's lecture Of course I'm confused? a freshman! Why else would I be E.. . Xa,

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fMQhMlS ckms of l964 t it ,It ' 1 .46 ,, 1, - 1- lf 1: fl g We I 'iv i 'fi l I' 1 I --'S , Miss Alice Britt In the life ofa young man the most essential thing for happiness is the gift ot friendship.-Sir Wm. Osler A FRESHMAN MEDICAL STUDENT is probably The most confused and bewildered thing in the world lexcept for a Sophomore taking a Pharmy examl. Even before he is accepteditomedical school, he grows taut and anxious at the thought of the M.C.A.T., the applications, the transcripts of grades, the choice of medical schools that might be naive enough to accept him . . . and finally The interview. This is a diabolical little session, where with anal sphincter tightly set, the applicant is scru- tinized, questioned and digested by members of The admissions com- mittee. This solemn little group, Trying to act cordial, but with NO written on their faces, asks the time honored questions: Why do you want to be a doctorf9 , Do you like girls? , What kind of a doctor do you want to be? , VVhy did you only get a B plus instead of an A in embryology? . . . and so on ad nauseam. . . . and then the special delivery letter arrived lwith 5 cents postage duel, congratulating us on our acceptance to medical school and would we please send 5100.00 immediately to hold our place. Our classmates shook our hand, Our families thought that we were heroes, Our parents had visions of us taking our place alongside l-lippocrates, Semmelweiss and Osler . . . . . . in the months preceeding the first day of classes, we masochistically thrived on rumors related to the monstrous Tasks that lay ahead: The total dissection of a human body, detailed histologic knowledge of the tissues comprising that body, and a mastery of its physiological and biochemical ramifications . . . land of course everyone knew that there were fewer seats in the Sophomore classroom, than in the Freshman classrooml . . . On September i5, i960 the ll4th academic year of the l-lahnemann Medical College began. We arrived early that day and attempted to stand coolly aloof. We wandered somewhat in awe through corridors ringing with the glad helloes of upperclassmen giving vociferous demon- in finding one another back. Ill hyperventilating tight stomachs and bounding pulses, eagerly en- stration of their ioy little monkeys with tered classroom A for the first time. Dr. Cameron addressed us and impressed us with his silver tongue . . The study of medicine is a life- long pursuit and we, the faculty, are but students at a little higher level of our education . . It was during this orientation that the bubble, which was our fantasmagorical idea of the noble profession, was gently but irrevocably deflated. He told us what was expected of us and what we in turn were to expect of i-iahnemann. Even then, we were not nearly prepared for what was to come . . . ANATOMY fell on us like a limp body and permeated our every waking moment, land some of our sleeping ones tool, as the formaldehyde did our clothes. The apprehension on first entering the anatomy lab and the odd feeling we had on seeing our cadaver for the first time soon faded as we became familiar with the routine of dissection, at first new and' exciting, but finally, iust plain hard work. Uncle Ray was a demanding taskmaster and his lieutenants hounded the little rascalsf' Wild Bill Callahan with his twin .45 Calibre forceps, Dr. l-laun with his precise

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X N F.. -.J it I Your concoction worked fine Dr. Oesper, but how do we get Larry Phillips back. Quality control at Hahnemann i I think the vagus is over there. on hemianopsia, or that hemiballism has nothing to do with crytorchidism. We worked our way down from the cortex through the maze of the internal capsule, the substantia nigra, the brachium pontis, until we finally arrived at the nucleus ambiguus - which it all was. Can we ever forget the day of the neuroanatomy final when the mercurial midget distributed what we thought were supplements to the Philadelphia telephone direc- tory and then announced, all right you rascals, count 'em and make sure you have seventeen pages. A few of us are still waiting for that lecture that was supposed to tie everything together . . . or did we have it'??'? BIOCHEMISTRY had us going around in cycles. ln this course we had a lot of contact with our professors -- particularly after exams. The de- partment knew us by code number, except Dr. DeFrates, he knew every- one by their first name the second day after the course started. We learned the Krebs Cycle forward, backward and sideways and could trace the labeled carbon all the way from pyruvic acid to carbon dioxide. We studied the work of Dr. Alper's two uncles-Embden and Myerhof. Dr. Boyd beguilded us with the intricacies of the Urea Cycle and as a result we knew what happened to the N15 in hamburger - as long as it was served without onions. During the spring we had 6 weeks vacation as we worked on individual research proiects. The labs were filled with chickens, rats, mice, guinea pigs, rabbits - and even an occasional student. Our first attempt at venipuncture were tried with the production of much mental trauma and hematomas. PHYSIOLOGY stimulated us at T5 millesecond intervals. It took us 5 weeks to learn the names of the equipment. We killed dogs, decorticated cats, pithed frogs la few pithed backl, fudged kymographs and got to the very heart of the turtle. While Mr. Bechtel was teaching the humani- ties, Corbett was demonstrating man's inhumanity to man, and proved to Slifkin that the fist is quicker than the nose. We learned -- chronaxie, d'emblee, recruitment, rheobase, threshold, and latent period - and fatigue is what we got out of it. Dr. Scott was all heart. Dr. Reed's lectures gave us nervous exhaustion - so we slept. Then he tried temporal summation li.e., when successive stimuli which are too boring to evoke a response are applied to an afferent student, they may be made effective by increasing the rate - but don't bet on itl. We utterly destroyed Van Slyke's theories and derived lll new meth- ods for figuring out a CO2 - all without a single case of mercury poisoning. The animals in physio were either very uncooperative or very dumb. They more often than not did the opposite of what the texts described as normal. Saturday morning was always a dread time. We did not mind the tests as much as we wondered if we would understand the instructions in time to do the test. The technicolor movies ran at half speed with English narrators were always a big hit. . . June arrived and our first year of Medical school was completed,