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

Page 9 text:

 “Mow, lei us endow our prisoner with added strength, horn of his diligence in searching for the meanings of his shadows. I.et him become so strong as to snap the chains that hind him and in this way permit him to approach the mouth of his cave. There his agonies are increased a thousandfold. While before he had beheld quiet darkness, he now cringes in a painful glure. While he had visioned merely black shadows and two-dimensional figures, he now is confused hv solidarity and color. Motions are changed, all is new, different, unfamiliar. “Here, then, is our man. Confronted at last by the truth lie sought, he is bewildered and cannot understand it. Gradually, however, his light-blinded eyes grow accustomed to the glare; here and there the memory of a shadow in his cave springs to meet and join with a shape before him. This process is repeated again and again with increasing rapidity, until he sits in comfortable contemplation of the knowledge that truth is his.” It should not be too amiss, in the hectic compulsion of modern medical training to reflect, however briefly, upon this parable of the cave. Just where in the cave are we now, whether freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior? At what magical point in the study of medicine does one. “sit in comfortable contemplation . . .?” Enter our cave with us. In the narrative section of the pages to follow, share our shadows with us.

Page 8 text:

4 | NCE upon a lime, in ancient Greece, a great ami wise man was asked to explain the nature of what men call. Knowledge. There was time in those days, apparently, for men to devote to such (y investigations. They had not yet developed the stratoplane, the jet y aircraft, the snorkel submarine, or the atomic age; and there was ' the reasonable assurance, lacked today, that if their problem was J not solved one day, they would yet find the world the same on the following day or even the following year, for the understanding of their problem. The great and wise man pondered the question for a time; perhaps he meditatively toyed with his heard. Probably at the same time he surveyed the compass of his questioner and quietly decided that the best course to the fellow's comprehension was by way of an illustration. “Consider the man in search of Knowledge, he said, “to be imprisoned in a cave, chained so that he can view only the • blind end at the back of the cavern while outside shines the light of Truth. Without, in the world of reality, all things move, bathed in the brilliant light of Truth. To our prisoner in the cave, however, O there is nothing but the wavering distorted shadows of these thing; cast on the wall of the cave before him. With great effort he learns 7 to differentiate one from another, to classify them according to shape or movement, to interpret them in relationship to one an- other. But, concerning the nature of each, he is ignorant . . . how could he he otherwise, never having beheld them in their true form? aa rT •' . ': O

Page 10 text:

A II M IMS PRESIDENT ROBERT LIVINGSTON JOHNSON AM.. LLJ . DEAN WILLIAM N, PARKINSON B.S., M.D.. M.Sc., (Med.). F.A.C.S., LL.D.