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

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As the sophomore year opens we take our life in our hands and ormed only with a plastic squeeze bottle of pink water and cryptic warnings from the staff we come face to face with the major enemies of man. In one semester we were treated to afternoon tete-a-tetes with every pus producing, infesting, stool dwelling creature that ever sow the inside of a hospital- Moreover, we came to know them intimotely. We studied their eating habits, their social preferences, their sexual behavior, their occupations and their taste for heat, cold and formalin. They ' re pretty people, all violet or pink or acid fast. They live in any neighborhood but they keep a messy house, turning the most pedicured pad into a scruffy tricophyta toenail. Microbiology was our first taste of anything that really approached medicine. We were particulary fortunate to begin our investigations of these pathologic aspects of life with the especially fine facilities and skilled stoff of practicing and reseorch Physicians with which we trained Our efforts m this difficult and confusing field were not always the finest however, as witnessed by the following authentic note left by the office on o stack of culture tubes in the incubator: Group 15, The tubes you marked FL are chick embryo (CEF) and the ones marked CEF ore FL. They are dead because they were upside down in the rack and the cells dried out. Better look at someone else ' s.

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. ' : 3:00, pathology: Sherwin: We ' ll run these films again in slow motion. Probably, the death throes of the virulent leukocyte ore among the most poig- nant . anonymous voice: This guy teaches two courses? and experience Medical sophomory goes beyond iotrotechnics and tedious medical theory. In the evening and on weekends, each student moves in his own way to divorce himself from dullness, to develop the person he is, or to pursue the person he fancies himself. He occupies himself so as to forget that the immense body of medical knowledge which is inscribed within his notebook will, in fact, escape his grasp forever. He plays tennis or golf or sails, for fun, but also to forget his failures or maybe to celebrate seemingly fleeting successes. In those few free times, when he wolks out the doors of County Hospital or McKibben, he finds himself in east Los Ange- les and that ' s where the trouble is. The sophomore is seen on the streets of the city in the late evening volunteering his services to help the poverty program or to support a neighborhood self help project. Outside the doors, also, is California, and the sophomore grows in the wealth of ambition and enterprise. Around him is the soft glow of success in the promising state where fortunes are literally made by men who, only a year before, saved a few cents buying chicken necks and wings for soup. The reality of the world outside and the unnatural camera obscura life in his medical books slowly cultures the maturity the sophomore seeks. All of the circumstances are given a different emphasis depending on the students background and orienta- tion, and, in this aggregate institutional society, each man becomes an individual. As the year closes and he finally reaches the point where he can ' t tolerate another line out of Robbin ' s or when the resolving power of his Meopto special exceeds the resolving power of his eyeballs, then he becomes thoughtful when he ' s alone. He dwells excessively on whether he has learned all he could in the post two years, and he pauses for a moment to anticipate the clinical work ahead with a comical enthusiastic dread. But in front of anyone else, the sophomore is a reluctantly vainglorious charac- ter who slumps heavily into his chair, slams his notes down onto his desk, and wearily affirms: If we con just moke it through the boards, we ' ll make it. 51

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infection, the silent enemies.