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

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an intelligent choice of a fraternity is concerned, it couldn't be done, because most of us didn't know each other, let alone the several hundred eager upper-classmen. But somehow the choice was made, and in passing, most of the participants felt that fraternities served a useful function at Temple — a social outlet for many, a home away from home for a few. and a place where companionship and escape from the common grind could be found. The fraternities are probably doomed in the not-too-distant future, as the Center moves to construct resident dormitories for its students. Certainly the delapidated relics they now occupy soon will go. either by sheer decay or by shun clearance, whichever comes first. With them will pass from the Temple scene an institution much to be mourned by those who knew it. Gradually, life took on form, substance and habit and with this passed much of the irrational fear of the unknown. But for a couple of confused souls who dropped out after a few days, we settled into a tontine grind of lectures and dissection, study and weekend dissipation. Those of us not already encumbered by ‘obligations’ elsewhere soon discovered the Nursing School and the various local bistros; all of which, (by way of a backhanded invitation I. we had been cautioned to avoid by Parky.’ Everyone soon discovered that unless you wanted to engage in a bull session for an hour or so. you didn't ask Dr. Bates any questions. It is said of Noble that if you asked him the time of day he would spend an hour explaining how a watch functions. Despite amusing remarks made about this professor's ebullience, there is no doubt that he has an amazing fund of knowledge at his fingertips, with powers of recall and association which arc truly incredible. (He also has a fine eye for art in photography). When a coffee break was needed, you took the stairs to the fifth floor and then the elevator, as this eliminated walking past ‘Daddy’ Huber’s office, and coffee breaks were not advisable at the College Inn at three o’clock, as The Probe’ came in then for his afternoon coke. Dr. Stauffer's X-Ray lectures were for sleeping, and several of us became the world’s champions at this luxury'. Freshmen could lx identified anywhere in the building by their characteristic odor, and the Anatomy Lab was a great place to petrify your date. Guest lectures on Wednesday afternoons were compulsory for Freshmen, both attendance and attention, until the first Victor Robinson lecture when even Dean Bucher went to sleep in the front row. after which attendance 21

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was of no importance; for the moment he was obviously the very best in his field. Dr. Sclye would be proud of most Freshmen on Day One — the old adrenal squeeze being in full swing. Witness the fact that when ‘Daddy' Huber finished his welcome by saying he would meet us in fifteen minutes on the sixth floor of the Medical School, a good third of the class ran up the six floors rather than wait for the elevators! {Something very few would ever do again except when the cantankerous lifts, like Calvin Coolidge, did not choose to run.) The eager students from Temple undergraduate school were prepared with books and short white jackets, as were the few ‘faculty brats’ among us, but the rest — a majority of the class — were lost somewhere along the line. ‘Daddy’ Huber, Temple’s answer to Lord Calvert, did much to pick up the loose ends and establish order amid chaos. His was, and is, the unpleasant task of introducing the new physician to his new and exacting profession; as Head of the Anatomy Department, he is the first to get his clutches on the students. This he did in such a cordial, painstaking manner, with such contagious pleasantness and good will, that in a few days most adrenals were percolating back at near-normal levels. Later in the semester, this worthy gentleman’s penchant for pendantry and compulsion for repetitious detail would become tiresome to most, but on Day One he was beyond reproach, and performed his task with obvious practice and dispatch. So it was through the major adjustments of the first semester, including the emotional trauma of human dissection ‘The Probe' was always there to point the way. It wasn’t until alter such introductions had become old hat that his soft-sell approach became tedious. The Anatomy Department did not live by ‘Daddy' Huber alone, however. There was Noble Bates, Temple’s infernal talking machine, who delivered his shortest lecture of the year on the first day, a half-hour, illustrated dissertation on how not to cross Broad Street; ‘Hoot’ Walker, a lanky red-haired Texan who seemed always on the verge of falling asleep; Norman Ricck, an angry young neuroanatomist with no apparent cause; Bob Trover, a friendly and competent person who needed to go on a diet, and did — becoming a mere embryo of his former self; Jack Hartman, an eminently qualified physician who could make the dullest subject captivating; and an import from Mysore. India, Dr. Rajagopal, an authority on fetal elephants who always looked as if he were stifling an enormous belch. These were our mentors for the initial five months, and the association was basically pleasant, often humorous, and generally informative Concomittant with Anatomy, a few one-hour-a-week classes met on such subjects as First-Aid, Public Health, and Psychiatry. The best of these courses was the History of Medicine with Fred Rogers, for it brought the light of humanism into dreary scientific halls. Although a professional institution, and therefore theoretically above such activities, our Medical School has chapters of several national medical fraternities on the ‘Campus.’ (‘Campus’ belongs in quotes at Temple, where alma mater resides in a collection of Victorian row-houses nestled around the Medical Center, a jungle-clearing valiantly resisting reclamation by the local creeping vegetation of social necrosis). Rushing began the first night with a tour of the various houses, an endless blur of faces, hundreds of handshakes. For the next two weeks, those of us who were interested were wined, dined and courted by the fraternities; which was fun because it presented free meals and beer, and a chance to sublimate the accumulated anxieties of the day with men who had filled our shoes before us. As far as making

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lagged. If you left your books in the hall, Mrs. Burns would hide them in her office; if ‘Parky’ met you on the elevator and told you that you had flunked the last regional examination, you took it with a grain of salt: if working late in the Anatomy Lab. you could stand on the sixth floor balcony and watch the student nurses going to bed on Carlisle Street. Little things like these made life more endurable. And so the fall progressed, from region to region, test to test, laugh to laugh, weekend to weekend, in a routine that varied only as the official schedule issued from the Anatomy office. Vet there were many diversions, some of them sordid, many of them ‘gross’ as only Medical Students can enjoy. There was the morning one cadaver, a particularly frail little lady, was found with a full length cast on one arm; and the time Dr. Huber gently extracted one of our more extroverted classmates from the top of his cadaver, upon whose chest he had firmly placed his knee for better leverage while sawing through a clavicle. Since this maneuver was in no way called for in the dissection, the student and his two partners remained in stunned silence while the facts of subclavian anatomy were spelled out in no uncertain terms for a full fifteen minutes. Men who habitually occupied the back of the room during lectures had to lx prepared to show I)r. Rajagopa! how to operate the slide projector, each day anew. Certain cadavers came to be friends, where the structure in question could always be found, whereas others were avoided like the plague. The cadavers and the dissections came to express the personalities of the workers, each table a bit different from the others. Of such is life, the bitter with the sweet, the rich with the poor, the good with the bad, and of such is a physician moulded. One morning after Christmas, as we were peering at brains in the Anatomy Lab, a tall, boney individual in a long white coat and graying hair loped into the lab, squinted through his thick rimless glasses, and in a Texas drawl demanded our attention. He was Dr. Hamilton, Chief of Biochemistry, he said, and he wanted us all to know that the honeymoon was over and Medical School was about to begin in earnest. This came as a surprise to many of us, who thought it had begun in September. Of course, he was intimating that Anatomy was a breeze compared to Biochemistry, and we had better be prepared to do some real work. He was both right and wrong; he was wrong about when Medical School had started. In Anatomy wc felt much closer to the practice of Medicine than wc would in chemistry, receiving actual tastes of clinical medicine through the efforts of such as the Radiology department and Sherm Gilpin and Fred Murtagh’s neurologic presentations Nocturnal visits to the Accident Dispensary had further augmented these glimpses of our eventual direction. One cannot fully empathize with a test tube; when asked to learn the chemical structure of the chief constituent of the milk of the duckbilled platv- 22