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

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Frank Barrera, M. D.

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Joan H. Gault, M. D. the large group: she relied more on Ruch Patton than on Selkurt, which would have been admirable had her interpretation been more helpful. Moving on to the cardiovascular system, Dr. Franco Barrera took his turn at murdering volume conduction, in preparation for a nicely-done series on the electrical aspects of the heart. Then Ascanio reappeared and redeemed himself by making the pump's pumping properties fairly clear-Starling's Law apparently accounts for most everything good and bad the heart does. Next (approximately), Dr. Joan Gault took the podium and some kitchenware, for the purpose of elucidating the microcirculation. Dr. Gault had the peculiar and distracting habit of punctuating her narrative with randomly placed chuckles which soon triggered a kind of feedback loop that got us all nowhere. It went something like this: she would make a sober statement about, say, capillary sphincters, then, for no obvious reason, chuckle. The class, finding this juxtaposition of sphincter and chuckle somewhat comic, would in turn itself nervously chuckle. Dr. Gault, her humor now seemingly reinforced, would make a sober statement about, say, arteriolar bifurcations, then chuckle. And so it went. Dr. Mary Wiedeman, of national repute in microcirculation research, presented a truly elegant laboratory demonstration employing her own films and a live bat under-microscope, and-perched on a stool-lectured to us on the eye and later on hormones. Lecture after lecture: we heard from Dr. Barrera again, on the lung (good); Dr. Michie went hopelessly around circles in the renal counter-current multiplier (bad). Dr. Ted Rodman Mary P. Wiedeman. Ph. D.

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was entertaining for a while and provided wads of handouts; new department member Dr. Elbert McCoy did lots of homework for his gastrointestinal series, claiming nothing in the textbooks was at all satisfactory. He also initiated the custom of greeting each new day with a little quiz; attendance was good. Elbert J. McCoy, Ph.D. In physiology laboratory, we experimented mainly on dogs and each other, though frogs and turtles occasionally showed up for the fun. While half the class no longer remembers it clearly, the other, coin flip-losing half will not shortly forget the exquisite discomfort of the infamous cold pressor test. Pulmonary function evaluation swiftly wiped out Hulac, Jacobson, Lund, Jenkins and Marks, suggestion a defect in either one of the spirometers or the mid-portion of our class alphabet. EKG day found Marc Richmond, ordinarily not an extroverted showman, entertaining us with his extra-systoles, which he can induce on command (a normal variation but neat cocktail party trick). Dogs were approached and attacked in teams of six: surgeon, assistant surgeon, technician, Gilson data recorder, and two kibbutzers. We soon learned the standard and familiar techniques for prematurely sending the beasts to their ancestors: slipping bulldog clamps on carotid arteries, sliding decimal places in dosage calculations, and slightly too high voltage on the stimulator. Sometimes no exogenous error was needed-a dog might merely decide to fade, and there you were with the respirator, Ascanio, and potential disaster. The lessons supposedly to be learned from the racked-out doggies were reviewed in post-lab conferences held in the most uncomfortable room in North Philadelphia. There we learned that there are enough reflexes in a dog to justify most any result except frank canicide. On some particularly lengthy afternoons these conferences presented additional demonstrations, such as Dr. Levitt's decorticate cats, whose ears twitch if you touch them (F letch: So is that the cat ear twitch reflex? Correct). Here also Dave Henley—hopefully for the only time in his life-was called on (by Oppie) as the bushy-haired kid in the back row. All these remarkable scientific happenings were analyzed and recorded by each of us in a laboratory notebook, which was submitted, in traditional grade-school style, to be checked and initialed.