Medical School!

There is no avoiding it. To become a doctor, one must attend medical school. That idea is astonishingly recent. For most of human history, a physician (healer, priest, barber, incantator, magician, muskekewinini... medicine man, in the lexicon of my Ojibwe in-laws) learned his or her craft as an apprentice to someone already established. The modern idea of Science put a lasting crimp in that approach.

I recently attended the sixtieth anniversary of graduating from the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classmates, so many have fallen. Nostalgia was rampant when we summoned the ghosts of shared memories. The rigors of lecture and clinical training. Midnight study sessions and endless tests. Most unforgettable professors. Ah...

The faculty of a medical school includes a lively collection of geniuses. Eccentricity flourishes. A comrade and I vied to recall the most memorable personality from a panoply of candidates. Super-erudite-and-proud-of-it Doctor... discretion suggests leaving some names to history, where they quietly reside. The anatomy prof whose oft-voiced ambition upon his death was to have his various parts preserved in jars of formaldehyde, thus allowing him to “teach” far beyond the constrictions of a lifetime? The instructor whose middle initial “P” surely stood for Pomposity? The surgeon whose secondary aim in life seemed to be the shriveling of medical students over irritation at having to squander research time teaching them?

Wait...

Call him Doctor Genius, for he came rightly by such a name. He taught neural anatomy. The man’s physique was a slender but muscled question mark. Gray hair obeyed no comb. Lines in lean cheeks enclosed a wide mouth in parentheses. An oversized jaw suggested strength of character. Humor had left telltale marks about his eyes. A long white coat, the designated uniform of a university physician, partially concealed garb suggesting that of a cowboy at home on the range. I have forgotten the style of his footwear. Boots? He was genial, kindly and a devoted teacher. He told us one day that he had grown up on a ranch in Montana. Finances were ever precarious. He had an identical twin brother. When the issue of education arose during a family council, it was decided that one lad should attend college, while the other stayed on at the ranch. As he told it, “We flipped a coin to see which brother did what. I lost and had to leave the ranch for school.”

A steeply-tiered anatomy department amphitheatre served as arena for his classes. He bounced across the floor below our high ranging seats like a hyperactive cricket. He raised ambidexterity to mystifying heights. Using chalks of a dozen hues, he rapidly and accurately sketched neural pathways of the human brain on broad blackboards at the front of the room. With both hands. At the same time! All the while, over his shoulder, he kept up a staccato explanation of what he was illustrating.

We students were enthralled.

One day he lowered a second blackboard in front of a maze of brilliant drawings on the stationary board. Dangling from a pair of wires, it promptly reacted to Dr. Genius’ scribbling and began to sway side to side, faster and faster. The good doctor side-stepped with its motion, back and forth, never missing a color or line. His audience began to titter. To keep up with his blackboard, he trotted faster.

A backhanded swipe knocked the spectacles from his face. Dr. Genius seemed unaware. Our sniggers grew up. Then, in his trotting back and forth (still sketching rapidly), he trampled the glasses and reduced them to rubble. We students strangled. Oblivious to what lay underfoot, he completed his diagram and returned to a podium. Without a hitch, he reached into a pocket and brought out another pair of glasses, which he hooked in place.

We exploded, drowning out the man’s earnest explanation of his drawings. When the laughter had subsided to a low rumble, he paused suddenly, peered over glasses-number-two at us and said, “Don’t worry about those others; I’ll grind them down and make a little-bitty pair.” We applauded lustily, while Doctor Genius stared at us in bewilderment.

Dr. Rasmussen—there! I revealed your name!—the intricacy of your drawings made the human nervous system less daunting to understand, but what comes to me through the filter of time is your gift of humanity, with its gentle quirks.

Belatedly, thank you!