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

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r i or - I L o Jj s : I’ (Jj CM. d J yCy . A Ji L h-ird VcVWf ury yjQ'ftQ, J113(sn pus, one’s hackles rise: when the geographical and chemical gyrations of the Haldane family, father and son. have been enumerated for the twentieth time by a white rat. one tends to fall asleep: when the semi-weekly examination purportedly testing one's knowledge of Biochemistry is returned with credit removed for spelling and punctuation errors, one tends to get discouraged: and after one has carefully collected and contributed to an enormous malodorous urine pool, and then spent the rest of the day boiling the StufT in unending quest for elusive molecules. one begins to wonder just where he is headed, and what all this mess has to do with Medicine. ‘Bones’ was right. Biochemistry was harder than Anatomy but not because it had to be. The fact of the matter is that the approach l the two departments toward the same problems was vastly different. ‘Daddy Huber said. Here is the material: we are here to help you assimilate and understand it.. while ‘Bones' said, “Here is the material; parrot every de- 23

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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

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tail back to me in two weeks or else. The Biochemistry lecturers, with the exception of Bob Baldridge and Joe Boutwell, were disappointing. For picayune adherence to nonessential detail coupled with uncanny ability to frustrate, irritate and bore, the Biochemistry Department at Temple has no peer in this author’s ken. Fortunately, ‘Bones’ shared equal time in the schedule with ‘Oppy.’ Physiology has never been known as a ‘snap’ course, but Dr. Oppenheimer and his staff, in addition to knowing a great deal about their respective fields, were also human beings who could converse, laugh, make jokes, and put their lecture points across in an interesting way. The laboratory was well run; the experiments interesting, by and large. Many a weary freshman in the second semester would cheerfully have forgotten Biochemistry altogether and concentrated on Physiology, but the exigencies of the situation were such that the reverse often obtained. Everyone feared 'Oppy,’ who had a reputation for towering rage and a low boiling point, but these qualities were practically never seen by our class, and the few times they were expressed it was not the student that irritated him. Actually, ‘Oppy’s friendliness and obvious competence won our enthusiastic respect by the end of the semester. It was obvious that ‘Bones’ and ‘Oppy’ begrudged one another the time each was allotted with the students; consequently each attempted to load us with enough material to preclude the possibility of study- ing anything else. This made life hectic, since there really weren’t enough hours in the day or night to do justice to either course. At times we felt as if we were standing at the bottom of a deep pit while two enormous intellectual manure spreaders dumped a never-ending stream, our job being to shovel the stuff out as it accumulated. But somehow winter became spring, and spring became June, and even North Philadelphia wasn’t so unattractive when the exams were over and it was summer. Most of us passed, more or less gloriously. Some faces, including those of a few class officers, were never to be seen again; others spent a busy summer preparing for re-examination in the Fall. But for most of us a year of hard work was over and behind us; and yet when we stopped to consider what we really knew about Medicine and its practice, it was obvious that the fun had just begun. Most were acutely aware of the fact that after four years of college and one of Medical School, wc really didn’t know much of anything that was useful to anyone. We could take solace from Thomas Huxley who said, ‘‘If a little knowledge is danger- 24