USC School of Medicine - Asklepiad Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

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r i. i - gg PLEASE DO NOT OCCUPY CAFETERIA TABLES Setcoeen I1-50A.M. fl zo 12-30P.M.

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SENIORS On the didactic side Dirty Dave Balderdash ' s lectures, suppiimented by pearls of wisdom from Mickey Rooney and the Whittier Flash, provided us with the essentials of skin diseases. These lectures were attended by everybody except Suits, Schreiner, and Courington. The whole subject was neatly condensed into one question and one answer: What ' s that? I don ' t know! Treatment of skin diseases was greatly simplified: If it ' s wet, dry it; if it ' s dry, wet it. If you don ' t know what the hell it is, tell them to buy a convertable and send them to the beach. It won ' t help the disease, but the kids will love you. And then there ' s the Zimmerman reflex In Survey of Disease Gene Manzer, wearing Stanford Red, pointsd out clearly to all that one doesn ' t have to be a mathematical genius to calculate fluid and electrolytes as long as the kidneys are working. Dr. Reynolds covered dis- eases of the liver so completely that nothing was left to be desired. He even had a slide of a familiar young, pre- cirrhotic, alcoholic bending his elbow in a sidewalk cafe. T ' was in this course that we learned the bread and butter value of the acute remunerative cholecystectomy; and that diabetics, as well as everyone else, have glucose toler- ance curves. Surgery Set Clinic taught us that Friday after- noons might be better spent at the beach and that McCranie hadn ' t really benefitted from his past 7 years of education. Graft is everywhere as we discovered from the fixed cases in Differential Diagnosis; that is, fixed for certain guest speakers. Jenkins still hasn ' t figured out which is better, -|--j- -[--(- or a very excellent remarkable. Oh well, we wouldn ' t have to put up with this course as seniors! With our last free summer over, we were finally, after an interminable length of time. Seniors! However, much to our dismay we still hadn ' t seen the last of Differential Diagnosis. At least the lucky juniors had. Aside from these Friday afternoons, we found that to the complexities of medicial education had been added the difficult task of deciphering clerkship schedules. This proved to be the hardest task of the 4th year. While the Peterson, et al., group re- lentlessly strove to account for every minute of the schedule, most of us spent the days drinking coffee in the forbidden Employee ' s Cafeteria; Howard Otto just gave up in con- sternation and stayed home. OB-GYN was a world of BOAs, Kielland and Simpson for- ceps, unsuccessful pudendal blocks, 15 second scrubs, fourth degree tears, passing the buck to the relieving crew, phan- tom applications, Oh Laudy, Laudy, Yi Yi Yi, the slippery elm and the delight of discovering the uppermost layer of the pubococcygeus. Oft heard remarks included; What d ' yo mean 59.9% effaced? , I can ' t pee now because I was castrasized downstairs. , fireballs of the womb. , I had congenial syphilis oncst. , I ' ve been ignemic all my life. , Everytime I menistrate I get clogs in my vagiba. , How can I be? I ' m not even married yet. It was here that Manzer discovered a new Pitocin method of birth control. There is general agreement that the high point of the year was NEURORTHOUROLOGY. The ortho residents seemed to take particular delight in assigning patients almost com- pletely encased in plaster which made physical examination difficult if not impossible. One enterprising individual talked to an empty body cast with a double hip spica for three hours trying to get a history. It wasn ' t until he tried to do the physical that he discovered that the patient had been dis- charged the day before. Many of the beds harbored bearded old men (and women) hopelessly entangled in a meshwork of wires, pulleys, ropes and braces looking like beat spiders spinning crazy mixed-up webs. One of our chores was to figure out why these things worked, what they were called, and how to get the patient out of them at time of discharge. Who can forget the Russell ' s traction with the H-P suspension supported by an Abernathy frame on a Flotz brace with 5 lb. weights on the eccentric flobab on the scramplate on an adjoining Anderssn-Sland rsen-Hendarsen-McGarnagie support on an attached Glatzalouheimer bridge? — me, that ' s who! J f ' F iSS THE Ci O D OUT TO THE JTUOENT TO PULL ON THE RBT iCTOf? O A OT 6 V THE - EHQSTflTS... . STOO 5UR J-EftV H£ OOES f ' T LOOK llKE OC , J UT rOU SHOULD SEE H M TA? ?T UEH TS . ' ' ' KKWiaeiM aEi»s»Miai

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In Urology we found out how easy it was to make old men howl with a simple flick of the cystoscope. Sometimes anesthesia was used. We listened in awe to the wisdom of myriads of great white fathers. We learned that even filli- forms had their followers. A stone basket, we found, was a delightful doo-dad designed specifically for pulling mucosa off of ureters. There were ample opportunities to use the cystoscope to take prying peaks into the bladder — usually after they were full of methylene blue. In Neurology the position a neurologist holds in the peck- ing order is indicated by the size of his tuning fork. Know anybody who wants to buy a 2048 tuning fork? Entertain- ment was provided by watching the residents apply Crutch- field tongs. They pulled one patient out of bed three times. About the only thing constructive that was done on the service was to leave it at the end of the four weeks. The senior Pediatric service was a horse of a different color. Yellow-green with mucus globs. The service was nice for several reasons; we were away from the gray dungeon, coffee in Childrens Hospital cafeteria was free, and every- one called us doctor. Speaking of calling people Dr. This only added to Harvey ' s paranoid delusions. It seems that when they called his name over the PA system at Childrens, people immediately started evacuating the building. Fire- stone is the code word for fire. Never to be forgotten was the three weeks spent on the clinic service; for this was the domain of Adolf Propp, supreme ruler and friend of man (but not medical students). The instruction at Childrens was excellent, and the schedule was filled with many conferences. The X-ray conference was especially liked; they turned the lights off and it was much easier to sleep. The instructors were very liberal on this service and the atmosphere was generally relaxed; Herman and Phil were even allowed to do advanced study in pediatrics on the Con tinent. OPD provided us with a practical knowledge of the general practice of medicine. Half of the class again left LACGH for this nine week service, while the less fortunate half roamed the 2nd floor of the Rock. The patients seen were of all shapes and sizes, and presented a multiplicity of problems; that is, I don ' t care if you do say it ' s all in my head Doc, I got pains. Here again we had many con- ferences and seminars- however, this time the instructors beat us at our own game. They were the ones who didn ' t show up. All in all it was a good service, and I have only one question. What is the brand name of OPD 139? Surgery proved to all that muscle fatigue is a real entity; especially to those of us who are less deft as switching the idiot stick from hand to hand and remaining out of the field. It also proved to many of us that they con make you admit on Saturday. Again the problems of fluids and elec- trolytes were presented to us. And you know what, they are still a problem! At this point it now seems appropriate that we end this rambling, disjointed discussion We have purposefully written it in a satirical vein for humors sake; but in spite of the satire we are deeply grateful to our faculty, who, true to the oath of Hippocrates, have unselfishly devoted their time and talents in helping us make the transition from laity to practicioners of medicine. With the complexities of medical education such as they are, it goes without saying that our knowledge at this point is small. Parenthetically, this means that we have obligated the remainder of our lives to the task of expanding upon this meager knowledge. Ws now, eagerly, but humbly advance to meet this obligation. Donald L. Hall Marshall D. Milton ' a £- f£ ' S THE GVr WITH T - £ Bl P- HOW ARE you eiNJOVINO- VOUR PED5 RESIPENCV?