I was excited about starting my clinical rotations but having to take a parasitology course with 2nd year students was really a slap in the face especially since I had made an “A” in it at Michigan in summer school.
My first quarter rotation was pediatrics and the Chairmen at Riley Hospital was Dr Meeks a real gentleman physician. During our introduction to his course he stated that no child would be referred to by race or ethnicity when the history was given. You were to say this 5 year old girl presented with leg pain, not this 5 year old colored girl; emphasizing the diagnosis would evolve by symptoms ( i.e. Sickle Cell Anemia or Tay Sachs ) not by their heritage. And that put him in a special class of physicians that I have never forgotten and I tried to emulate during my career. There certainly were others who treated patients with disrespect and callousness that I never respected no matter what their professional statue.
Riley Hospital was the IU pediatric hospital and it provided us with a vast amount of clinical diseases; many common and many rare. Polio was an awful disease that when diagnosed completely devastated a family. In fact a couple of medical students contracted it during my 4 years. The polio ward at Riley held about 30 iron lungs that required 24/7 attention mostly by medical students. There was an adult unit at Long the University hospital that held an equal number of polio patients. We students did the tracheal toilets and debridement of the bed sores and a few of us worked as special nurses 11-7 for pay. I’ll never forget a fellow student that was married and got polio in his junior year and I specialed him. He was so depressed that he would curse his wife who sat with him every night. One night I was so angry at him for treating her so badly I told him I would pull the plug on his iron lung. But I could really empathize with him after my bout with TB.
The year was 1956 and the Salk vaccine was released and all students were inoculated as well as the adolescent population of the country and in one year new polio admissions were practically eliminated. The adult ward was closed and the children’s unit was pretty much moth balled. Polio was a disease I saw destined for extinction during my medical school stay.
One of the things that IU was noted for was the clinical exposure the students received on their rotations and pediatrics was a classic example. We were allowed to draw blood and give infusions on infants and children. This included scalp vein, femoral and jugular punctures as well as cut downs. All of these techniques were not commonly learned at other medical schools and held us in as a desired recruit for internship nationally. One of the positive skills I can attribute to my training at IU. Also on my pediatric neurosurgery rotation, a Chief resident allow me to insert a Holter Valve ( a tube that drains the ventricle of the brain thru the neck in to the abdomen) into a hydrocephalic patient which was an awesome experience at the time and still is!
I liked Pediatrics but wasn’t sure I could deal with non verbal patients on a regular basis. I had more clinical services to come and time decide what I wanted to do as a specialty if I chose one.
My next service was Internal Medicine which I found overwhelming because you are dealing with the entire body and putting together a diagnosis requires an inexhaustible knowledge base. But I liked the challenge of putting the parts of the puzzle together to come up with the disease. Most of the things at a medical school are referred in because they represent difficult problems that aren’t easily diagnosed so none of the problems were easy. We had some exceptional clinicians and three hospitals, IU, General (now Wishard ), and the VA for our patient population. I can say I learned a lot and I sure it made me a well rounded doctor in the end.
The Surgery rotation started out on a bad note because it was known that the Chairman of the department had stated that Blacks did not have what it took to be a surgeon and had refused to accept a friend who had interned at General Hospital for that reason.
Guess whose service I ended up on for my surgical rotation? Dr S, the character, who had used the derogatory term “ Kingfish “ the year before to Black classmate.
Now Dr S was a short pretentious man with a tremendous ego, as do most surgeons, who affected the syrupy southern drawl of his Mississippi birth place. And he was always relating “ when aw was at the Hopkins” (Johns Hopkins Med School) I did this and did that ad nauseaum.
Granted he was an excellent surgeon from a knowledge base but he tended to get frustrated and lose it at critical times. And later in my training in residency I worked with some surgeons who could operate rings around him.
He had a habit of calling on the Lord in tense situations saying things like “ Lawd have mercy can somebody stop this bleeding” or “ Lawd get this stupid SOB out of my operating room”. One time during an especially difficult case he asked the nurse to lay a sterile sheet on the operating room floor and said “ Aw needs to rest” he then laid down with arms out stretched like Christ on the cross and asked “ would some body please bring me a cold Coke Cola”. The nurse hurried in with one and pulling aside his mask poured it in his mouth. He exclaimed “Aw feel so refreshed” and resumed operating. That scene and statement could have been made into a commercial spot for Coke on TV today.
A favorite incidence occurred during a major case in which he was removing a huge abdominal tumor. The operating room was filled with observers as was the gallery above. He requested that the assistants at the table feel this unusual mass which he described in detail “Aw wants everybody to palpate this because you may never get to see or feel anythin like this” the table was ringed by a dozen or so student and residents and suddenly a bare hand reached into the field, felt the tumor carefully and withdrew. He almost fainted and to this day no one knew where the hand came from. Probably by someone near the table, who got carried away by his histrionics?
My best rotation in the 3rd year was OB/GYN at General Hospital. The two Chief residents were laid back guys and if you were willing to work they would let you do anything. Not like the University rotation where all the student did was count contractions and feel their intensity and then call the nurse.
About a week into my rotation I got to see my first C-section. It was done by the department Chief of OB at General. The operation was fascinating to me, how they could open up the uterus and removed the baby and sew everything back. It took about 3 hrs to complete and I was really impressed. About a week or so later, I was on call and a Black OB/GYN did a C-section and it took him roughly 30 min. I didn’t have any frame of reference to compare the operations or the surgeons but I said one of these guys did something and it could have been wrong. I don’t know what, but if I ever go into OB I’m going to be like the 30min guy. And the 30 min guy was named Frank Lloyd who became my mentor and set me on the path to a career in OB/GYN.
One other rotation had a challenging influence on my life and career. The rotation was Neurology and the Head of the Dept was Dr Lester Drew. He was also consultant for the State Hospital for the Mentally Disabled at Muskatatuck, IN. We were in a rotation of 5 students and we went with him to see patients and on the way back he inquired did any of us know any chemistry. One of my friends John spoke up and said Robbie is real good in chem.. Drew asked me to drop by his office when I had time.
The visit expanded to an offer to be a student research assistant for a lab he was setting up in the newly constructed Institute for Neuro-psychiatric Research.
He needed me to set up a lab from scratch to do research on a project he wanted done….. a test to detect serum copper levels in a micro technique. The disease he wanted to detect was called Wilson’s Disease and it produced both neurological and psychiatric deficits in patients.
He would be gone to Japan for a year as a member of a team that was to examine the after effects on people from radiation of the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
My job would consist of buying, equipping, and setting up the lab and developing a technique to do micro detection of serum copper. I would work full time in my off quarter and part time during the rest of the year that was left. The interesting thing was he gave me the authority to sign purchase orders which pissed off some official in the University, since some of the equipment was 10-15 thousand dollars and I was ordering it. There was a PHD candidate that was over the whole lab that was advising me and we were cool, years later he became a professor of chem at Ohio State and sent his wife to me for OB care.
I immediately got down to business and got the lab up and running and even wrote up the protocol for the test to be published but I graduated and lost interest and the test was developed at another school.
Dr Drew was really my rabbi and offered a residency in pediatric neurology but I declined. I told him where could a Black pediatric neurologist make a living, he said New York City where he had trained but my sights were now setting on OB/GYN.
I now had one more year to go and couldn’t wait to start..
