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

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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

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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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a wrist cramp as in her soft-spoken, never-excited manner she filled our notes with meticulously outlined masses of information. Later, the boss and l)r. Collins continued in patient earnestness to soften thick freshman skulls. Then, too. there was the laboratory. Here the regular staff, assisted by Mrs. Jean Weston, Miss Wendy Wester, and the comely Miss Dottie Ellis tried desperately to keep five-thumbed hands from completely fouling up apparatus and produce results within the range of probability. Also in the lab was Dick, the chief technician who kept us in childlike awe as he nonchalantly smoked a kymograph drum without burning it. kept his shirt clean, all with never a finger print on his face or the drum. He shellacked the records without getting his trousers stuck to the table or the records to each other, and he took the most ferocious dogs out of the cage without spilling a drop of his hlood. He also sold us seraphins for half the hook store price. Looking hack, these many worth-while hours can never be measured in so many words. As Dr. Oppcn heinier said, when he demonstrated ventricular fibrillation in a dog's heart. “No word of mouth can describe something like this; to see it and feel it is to know it.” Correlated with our neurophysiology, after we had sweat hlood for the anatomy finals, was a thing called neuroanatomy. Armed with the newest pastel shades of pencils and reams of diagrammed papers, we listened to Drs. Weston and Kimmel explain how about two kilos of nervous tissue isn't actually complicated just hopelessly baffling. Desperate!) we tried to draw a blue line following Dr. Weston as he bounded up and down a ladder, tripping happily across the black hoard following the fibers as they crossed the first sheet, caught the second as it flew past on the diagonal, bisected our cuff, turned green when we broke the blue pencil, and raced on thalamus bound. Nothing could stop it until the sheet with the thalamus blew out the sixth floor window into the spring atmosphere and Broad Street soot. (Oh. well, there are still lots of other tracts, so one thalamus more or less can't mean too much.t Saturday mornings found 603 filled to standing room with students, wives, and prospective spouses as Dr. Spurgeon English began to explain everything, from the oral stage to why medical students make punk husbands. Here we learned that the psychiatrist calls it “id.” that we are plagued with a chaperonish super-ego, and that “ego” docs not mean our thumbs hooked in the vest pockets of our conservative pin stripes. We left feeling sure the normal people of the world are definitely a subversive minority, that we are doomed to marital battles, and that it might be well to eye our classmates with an air of suspicion. While the memories of steaming, smelling bio- Lcft: I r. Morton Oppmlieimer ... To see il and to feel il is lo know il. Center: Drs. Oppenheimer and Sokalchuk watch the freshmen cavort. Ri ht: Dr. Grcislicimcr . . . soft spoken, never excited. 15