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

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and in transit provided our first introduction to Arthur Nelson, M.D., the new Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, former military engineer and quasicompanion along the way. The second of the nationally known men we met during the Freshman Year appeared in the person of Raymond C. Truex. Temple was as new to him as it was to us, but he had one distinguishing, all-important ally: A head-spinning knowledge of human neuroanatomy. The student of Truex is the student of a willing and able teacher. The su- and we knew it; just as we knew that his overall, oversimplified General Concepts of Umbilicus were not really all that one had to master before healing the infirmed. Yet, even when his bland verbal unction for our ego decubiti wore monotonously thin (as it did within a few weeks), we had at times to muster up enough self-deceit, having exhausted our cynicism, to believe that perhaps wishing will make it so. Daddy is a title not lightly earned and certainly not lightly worn. We now know that aside from his paternal interests in Freshmen, JFH also enjoys an international reputation in Anatomy and in progressive medical education. In the anatomy lab we met our first (and for most, last) cadaver — face down. The usual crisis of the first lunch eaten in one's grease-sticky apron was soon met and conquered. Freshman happiness is olfactory adaptation. Resignedly, families bowed to the odiferous presence of fledgling medics in the house; even desperate student nurses invested formaldehydic excursions in their marital hope chests. If the lab was an education in the static certainty of origin and insertion, it was also an exercise in the unpredictable dynamics of heterogeneous human interrelationships. Through table to table politicking, we selected one from our ranks to function as the spokesman for his peers in a series of struggles waxing both sublime and ridiculous. Would there or would there not be an honorable Honor System? This highly rhetorical question fruitlessly occupied the group mind for many hours, perb ambidextrous presentations of Robert Troyer (particularly his three-week synopsis of the nine-month maturation of an embryo) will not soon be forgotten by this generation of Temple students. Equally admirable were the frenetic fact-filled hours with Carson Schneck, particularly as he tried to outline the complex anatomy of the hand and ear in impossibly short hours. In Anatomy, it must be said, we had fun mixed 28

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CLASS HISTORY Medical education is insidious. Its ultimate aim must be perspective: Less how to act than when to act; less what is said than by whom. Its most sure approach is infiltrative; its greatest ally time. Such knowledge comes late to the seeker and sooner to the innocent. Prematurely unbecoming, it is the full-term child of Knowledge and Responsibility. Their wedding is unheralded but the feast is long and sweet. Second generation offspring are care of the sick and teaching others who come behind, with the joy that comes from hard work well done. Patience and Thoroughness warm the bed where this pair sleep; Apollo himself turns back the sheets. FRESHMAN YEAR After the incipient scramble by the five fraternities for their lifeline of new members, immersed by an inundation of new faces and mixed emotions, the Class of 1965 settled down in 1961 to a new life. At Temple, as at most medical schools, the introductory academic offering is anatomical. Insofar as any area of medicine is straightforward, anatomy is straightforward; its factual framework helps soften the differences in intellectual direction between collegiate and professional education. We were fortunate in having for our first semester shepherd John Franklin Huber. His reassuring smile, coupled with a long-practiced technique of using one’s first name, was comfortingly out of place in an educational system which cultivated institutionalized insecurity. It was out of place 27

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with fact. Lorenzo Rodriguez’ lightning wit and laconic comprehensiveness urbanely balanced M. Noble Bates' cheerfully unending approach. Gail “Lights Out Crouse’s demure manner often camouflaged a ready laugh and easy affability. His colorful lantern slide lectures frequently left more than one freshman in the dark. These, along with those by Herbert Stauffer and his shadowy friends, clearly demonstrated, if nothing else, that complete happiness is somnolent olfactory adaptation. Ostensibly occupied in learning, we devoted much of our time in lab and lectures to studying our classmates and projecting our self-image. Most of the class entered Temple expecting to find the cream of the intellectual crop: The creative, imaginative, well-read scholar that each knew in his heart was the real he. Class discussions convinced each “thinker that, alas, he was an island io a sea of intellectual boobs who. as the Saturday night parties confirmed, were sensual savages and latent alcoholics to boot. Only as we, as individuals, became more sure of our own innate worth were we able to find the goldmine of personal resources in our colleagues. Admittedly, some of those mines never appeared to contain more than fool's gold — but one can’t be sure when the bright glare of his own ego distorts his symbolic vision. The Philadelphia Athletic Club hosted the annual melee (more formal and less delectate than the weekly frat saturnalia) that served as a funereal reminder to sophomores that neophyte ignorance is bliss, and to freshmen that more haggard days were less than a year away. Other peripheral sorties into medical history and public health led by Fred Rogers gave us some of the last chances any group had to hear the fiery John A. Kolmer, ever young beyond his years. With the conclusion of Anatomy passed the relaxed attitudes of Roger “Let’s look that one up together Davidheiser and Daddy's enlightened S-X-U. If opposite poles were ever to attract, it should have happened in the Spring of 1962 when predictable Robert Hamilton and volcanic Morton J. Oppenheimer locked horns in a struggle for any time not preempted by ping-pong and pool balls. Organized men, which some must surely be, have a friend in Robert Houston Hamilton. As he inimitably says, I can understand why you gentlemen are so often late. ... I was late once myself. Along with the Professor’s sincere dedication to comfortable organization, the departmental verve is Bob Baldridge, scintillating if cynical, a man who sees beyond the outline. Was endocrine metabolism ever more lucid before (or since) Joe Boutwell “structured it for us? The versatile Jonathan Cilley 29