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

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were bright moments, of course, hut they were always dimmed by the knowledge that Dr. Hamilton's philosophy of teaching was, heat them down and they'll work harder to pull out; which is true, hut only up to that point where discouragement sets in to outrank the returns from study. Those monthly quizzes, which were not so difficult in themselves, were demoralizing because of a grading system that marked down for misplaced and misspelled words, for failure to include almost insignificant points so that detail superseded the broader concepts of the chemistry of the body. Long hours we stood in that lab which the van Scivers had neglected to equip with stools, adding a drop of this to five mils, of that, shaking carefully and watching the blue—or red. or green, or yellow—color develop. We analyzer! urine collected in bottles that once had held mayonnaise or milk or Seagrams Seven till the atmosphere was overpowering with the stench of the cooking yellow liquid. More than one of us gagged when he pipetted that precious fluid carelessly. And more than one of us. after a dehydrating evening, had to borrow it from some other individual whose nights were less enjoyable. The freshman year is not pleasant, for the most part. Six hours a day spent over a cadaver is not conducive to the best sense of humor. And there is always the fear that there arc not twenty people in the class dumber than you. Sometimes it seems that no matter how hard you study, you always slip up in one place the one place they choose to ask about on the quiz. But the quizzes are not infrequently fair. Dr. Huber always handed our quiz grades to us on folded slips of paper, with a grade for each of the six questions and a grand total. Those few moments were usually the most exhausting part of the day. And then we’d all crowd around the bulletin board in the hall to see which “stinker'’ had asked which question—we always knew the answer cold, but the marks never showed it. We got to the point where we could always count on a low grade from Dr. W eston. Dr. Jean Weston—we always recall him with chuckles, though at the time he was almost the devil incarnate. There was that fiendish grin, the sharp biting wit coupled with a sort of dry fiat speech that took the wind out of freshman sails so quickly and so thoroughly that they were deflated for a week. At any time of day, when he was instructing our group, he would come up. lift a nerve out of the mess of fascia and muscle and blood vessels. Then the blow would fall: “ hat is this nerve, what are its functional components? What does it supply ? What segments of the cord does it come from? When we didn't know the answer, he would say. “Good God. you should have stayed in bed. Or even worse, he would look at us as if we’d been bathless for a month, then stalk off to some other pair of anatomists who were already quaking with the anticipation of his descent nothing was safe—we should have stayed in bed. But Left: Van DerWerkcr and Taylor . . . which one ha - the proper color reaction? Center: Dr. Kimmcl . . . another knot lied, another lesson taught. Right: Drop! 13

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failures resulted from unsuccessful tussles with physiological chemistry. During that first week we picked up all sorts of interesting information about the school. For instance, we could ride the elevator up, but we had to walk down; and if “Gravel Gertie,” the housekeeper, were running it. she'd always stop short of the floor, then rasp out, “Go ahead, you can climb it!” We learned that the Dean's word was not only law, it was Holy Law; that the library was safe ground only from twelve to one o’clock when Mrs. Krieble was furthering the cause of the peptic ulcer in the hospital dining room. We learned that you could get sea food at Fishers, salads at H H, clean and uninteresting food in the cafeteria and gastritis at Keesal’s. Anatomy, at first was confined to room 603 where the effect of the central front light was hypnotic, and to the histology lab where the effect of long hours over the microscope was paralytic. We learned how to adjust the light on the microscope, and having accomplished that, investigated the developing embryo on multi-colored slides. Dr. Donald L. Kimmel lied his arms and a piece of gauze into intricate knots to explain the growth of the human embryo; he diagrammed it in sections horizontal and vertical, while our sweat blurred the ink on our rapidly filling cards of notes. Some of it we understood. Patterned in red and yellow and green chalk, in surrealistic lines that crossed at mad angles and were forever being muddled. the intra-uterine human followed Dr. William Pritchard a few steps further along in development and drove some of us a few steps nearer that borderline between reality and insanity. Then came the great day when we first donned white coats ourselves, the day we got our cadavers. Dr. Huber lectured first, reassuring as usual. He told us that we belonged to the few people of the world who are privileged to study human material. He hold us that there is nothing about a cadaver to fear or to arouse disgust. And remembering that, we walked down the hall to the gross lab, which we had only sniffed cautiously before. We started where we could do the least damage. on the back. Meticulously we broke off the nerves we were supposed to save. Wielding the scalpel and the probe (the instrument, not the professor! separating layers with our fingers, slimy with grease, we assumed a fragrance that a bath in Clorox wouldn't dispel, one that turned our stomachs at the mere thought of liverwurst. So this is medical school. Well, we like it. The long days in anatomy are hard, physically and mentally; read and dissect, read and dissect til our eyes bulge and our hands are numb, but we like it. The odor, the frequent threat of quizzes, the heat, the lack of sleep are ever with us—but still we like it. Chemistry . . . when we think back over chemistry, none of us can deny that the course we got was excellent, but few of us can truthfully recall those hours with any degree of pleasure. There Left: Now, wc don't like to fail people ... Dr. Robert Hamilton, Professor of Physiological Chemistry. Center: Dr. Weston obtunding the CNS. 1 feci no pain. Right: Nay and Molthan sweat out a cross section with Dr. Moyer. 12

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behind “Jock W eston's tough front, there is a sense of humor we all learned to enjoy and anticipate. and an ability to teach that is only rarely surpassed. Before the year was over-—-somewhere near the end of it. however -we began to think maybe we had misjudged “Smilin' Bob' Hamilton. Why, we had even learned some chemistry painfully, but we had learned it, nevertheless. This man from Texas could smile. He could roll a cigarette with one hand; he could scare hell out of us and sometimes even make us feel we deserved it. Most of us still remember his emphasis on the niceties of technique. He spent ten minutes one morning telling us how to separate the yolk of an egg from the white. Later, while we surreptitously fished out broken shells from albumin generously mixed with yellow, he deplored our lack of skill. His insistence on the niceties of technique was probably well-founded. But Christmas came, passed all too quickly, and on its heels tumbled semester exams and three new courses crammed into an already dizzying schedule. With the passing, or at least completion, of the mid-term exams of our freshman year, we noticed several marked changes both in us and in our surroundings. This ogre medicine no longer seemed so fearful. Why, we were practically sophomores. Our achievements appeared mighty impressive, especially to us. We had lost that perplexed despair when thinking of the magnitude of our task, we had developed a compensatory list so Gray's Anatomy no longer wrenched our shoulders, and we no longer noticed the people staring and sniffling at our formalin waitings when we went into Fisher’s for lunch. At least fifty per cent of the time we could pour the contents of one test tube into another without permanent damage to our persons, clothing, or colleagues: and those of us who had to, had even learned to accept Major ShifTer and his happy hour scout meetings in the school yard. Perhaps our fancy wasn't quite so Mittyish as to picture tailored scrub suits and elbow length rubber gloves, but we did begin to think we might look well with our thumbs hooked in the vest pockets of our conservative pin stripe while we calmly reassured a distraught patient. Then Dr. Oppenheimer and his first team came into action. Good Lord! The dean is absolutely unreasonable expecting us to do half again as much work with chemistry and anatomy not slowing at all. A test every week—we ll never make it. I don't see how those upper class-men ever got through all this; it must have been easier then. Guess the Phillies will have to do without our patronage at their night games. As soon as the effects of the original blow passed, we found this new course fascinating in an ever-increasing degree. Dr. Greisheimer caused many Left: Dr. Hcnny . . . it’s a matter of critical mass. Center: “You should have stayed in bed!” Right: Dr. Kobinson . . . worked with Van Slyke. 14