I applied to 4 medical schools my last year of college in the following order,
Indiana, Howard, Meharry and Cornel and was accepted by all. I chose Indiana over the others because I was a resident of the state and the in state cost; the tuition was ridiculously less than Cornel. Also if I had gone to either Howard or Meharry I might have taken the slot from a fellow Black student that wouldn’t be accepted at the white schools. Indiana had a quota and they only admitted 3 Blacks 3 women and 6 Jews a year, this continued to exist well into the 1970’s.
Indiana is a state that has only one medical school even to this day and in 1953 the first year was on the Bloomington, IN campus. This put you in with the undergraduate student body with all those distractions. Southern Indiana was very prejudice, in fact, there is a town, Martinsville, on the way from Bloomington to Indianapolis that was a Klu Klux Klan strong hold and one of the Black undergrads was in an auto crash. He died because the hospital there would not treat him. So travel to and from IU was always cautious and limited our social radius Fortunately, I had housing in a graduate dorm complex that was isolated from the main campus and managed to find some activities that weren’t just all study.
One of the first people I became friends with was a guy named Suggs, a freshman dental student who had gone to IU as an undergrad and knew his way around the campus .I was looking for where to hang out. And before even registering for med school, we went to an after hour club called the “Elks”with a couple of undergrad under age coeds and got in a fight because someone punched him about some girl. And I jumped on the guy who had knocked him to the floor leading to a free for all that ended in the bartender putting everyone out before the police came. Luckily we didn’t get arrested and put out of school before we began. This incident bonded us and we have been tight ever since.
The first year was on the semester system and the following 3 years were spent at the Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis on the quarter system. The classes were year around so the clinical services would be covered in the junior and senior year. The students were divided into fourths with one fourth being out of school in any quarter for vacation.
The first year basic courses like gross anatomy and physiology were 2 semesters long and histology and some smaller subjects were 1 semester long. Everyone was given a summer vacation if they passed if not a summer course was offered to make up any failure
I have always believed that medical school is hard not because the subjects are especially difficult but because you are expected to know everything in a book and in a lecture, even footnotes. Everyone admitted to the school is smart but the sheer volume of material overwhelms some and the attrition rate can be rather high especially when the grading is on a curve and you fall on the far side of the bell curve.
The first anatomy exam was an eye opener for the entire class especially when the grades were posted; it became sphincter tightener. Everyone even the Phi Beta Kappa’s felt they had done well. As I recall, the highest grade was 68 and fell like a ski slope to some in a single digit!
On top of that our professors though most PhD’s all had a hard on for medical students since none were MD’s and were jealous of the financial rewards that awaited those of us who managed to survived their courses to graduate as MD’s
And years later when the medical school consolidated to the Indianapolis campus the basic science professors were required to have duel degrees to remove this prejudicial acrimony.
There was a real racial divide beside the quota for admission that excluded the Black students from any study group. The whites had medical fraternities that had files of old exams going back 40 or so years that helped them in their study groups. We only had random old exams that a few of us passed down but these were seldom effective in helping us on tests, since they were not typed or collated in any way as the frat exams. Occasionally a white colleague would share a subject like a gross anatomy old exam with their study group. But basically it became cut throat. There was one of my fellow three Blacks whose brother had passed down his exams to him and he would not share them with us. That’s pretty cold! And I never have forgotten that. Some people are born chicken shit.
After the shock of how hard and detailed the courses would be we all settled into a mode that was riddled with anxiety and fear. Professors had idiosyncrasies that you would not believe.
In physiology, a major course, Dr H lectured from a stack of faded 3X5 index cards that he had been using since graduating from Harvard years before. He had studied under the infamous Dr Canon who was renowned for his work on the decerebrated cat who he constantly reminded us of.
Dr H talked with a high pitched whinny voice who sniffed and snorted as he talked and never looked up from his note cards. One lecture went thus “if you cut the bagus nerve and stimulate the afferent fibers such and such will happen to the heart”. The proper word was vagus but in my notes I took down bagus and not finding that in the text assumed that this was a special nerve. Since I had no old exams to steer me, I committed the lecture word as the right word for the test. When I got back my blue book with ”F” I went to his office to find out how I had gotten all my answers wrong. He looked at my blue book and hurled it across the room, exclaiming “ Robinson you are probably the dumbest student I have ever had, what in the hell is the “Bagus nerve”?. “It’s the (Vagus nerve)”. Needless to say I had to repeat the course with a bunch of my classmates that summer. There are other anecdotes in the other years that if I hadn’t been determined I would have ended like many dropping out. Those were some tough times and as I write, I wonder how the students of today would fair, probably better since harassment is now not permitted, at least, knowingly. This was my first year of medical school and I knew that it wouldn’t be easy and that I faced racism from my professors and fellow students; yet I was not going to allow that to
keep me from graduating. I have always been able to speak my mind and at times that got me in trouble but I demanded respect and in the end I got it.
