Almost-a-doctor

I walked through the autumn leaves in the fall of 1950, toward my first day as a real medical student with a feeling of exultant expectation. Up till then, I had found that being a “pre-med” didn’t make as much impression as I would have liked. With girls, especially, the attitude seemed to be “Forget this one; he’ll be buried in the books for four more years.” But now my embryo medical career was finally on track. I had at least made it in through the door.
     Classes for first year medical students were all held in one building, across campus from my home. I joined seventy would-be doctors in the lecture auditorium that first day, all of us waiting with apprehension for the professor of anatomy to appear, who would rule our lives for the next five months. First semester in medical school covered only two subjects: Human Anatomy and Histology, which is anatomy viewed through a microscope.
     Dr. Phillip Armstrong was a deceptively bland man in his fifties, who made no effort to put us at ease. His aphorisms were memorable:
     “We will address you here as ‘Doctor’. For some of you, this will be the only time you will ever hear it applied to you.”
“Up until now, you have worked to achieve a well-rounded education. Here, we intend to flatten you out.”
     We spent that first day getting organized into working groups of four, and learning detailed instructions for the care and study of our cadavers. We took notes on everything; one nervous student even jotted down the professor’s “Good morning.” We entered the dissecting room that first afternoon, wondering what our reaction would be to studying the dead. We four, Onas Morgan, Tony Rivera, Tony Slivinski, and I, grouped ourselves around our dissecting table, and surveyed the motionless shape swathed in pungent, formaldehyde-soaked layers of sheeting beneath the yellow oil-cloth.
     Following the instructor’s directions, working one pair on each side, we laid bare the groin area and made a first incision along the inguinal ligament, surprised at the toughness of human skin, careful to go slowly and meticulously, exposing and identifying each nerve branch and blood vessel. We would spend most of the first week on the abdominal wall, laying open each muscle layer under the critical eyes of the instructors and Dr. Armstrong himself.
     Dissecting a dead person brought a feeling of awe, different from working with dead animals in my pre-med courses. All of us had a healthy fear of making a mistake in the work and earning Dr. Armstrong’s displeasure. Perhaps he kept us off-balance on purpose during these first uneasy encounters with death.
     “The name of the muscle is not pronounced ‘ili-op-soas’ as it is spelled,” he said. “Say ‘ilio-soas.’ The ‘p’ is silent. As in swimming.”
     Three students dropped out that first week. One fainted dead away. Another threw down his scalpel, cursing, and stalked out. We never saw him again. Rumor had it that the third decided to take his girl-friend’s advice to study pharmacy instead.
We compensated for our insecurity with a certain amount of dark humor. Medical students learn a large number of limericks and memory devices, ranging from the fate of nymphomaniacal Alice or the efficient young man from Bel-Air, to the names of the eight bones in the wrist or the sequence of the twelve cranial nerves.
     We four lab partners learned that our cadaver’s name had been Peter B_____, who had died in a state hospital of “old age.” Weeks later, deep in the abdomen, we found that undiagnosed urinary obstruction had destroyed his kidneys.
     A month after entering medical school, I had acute appendicitis. The operation went well, but spinal headaches from the anesthetic kept me on my back for a week. I still recall trying to study, holding the six-pound Gray’s Anatomy textbook on my sore abdomen. I also remember, when I was exhausted by the four-hour work sessions in the anatomy lab the following week, that even Dr. Armstrong had a compassionate streak. He stopped at my table to ask quietly how was I, and to tell me it was all right to take a rest break occasionally.
     We four, and most of the rest, survived that five months and the examination at the end. One of my tense friends panicked when the examiner thrust a skull at him, jabbed a finger at the large opening at the base and barked, “What goes through there!”
“Food!” the student blurted, then winced as he realized the answer should have been spinal cord. Our universal wish, we all agreed, was that we could repeat the whole course, now that we knew what we were supposed to be learning.
     We celebrated the end of anatomy the last weekend in January, a double milestone for me. That night I first met the girl I would marry.