My Brief Career as a Medical Student
Gerald M. Siegel, '53Siegel@umn.edu
Any thoughts I had about going to medical school and becoming a doctor ended very early in my college career, in my first semester at Brooklyn College, in an introductory biology course.
One of the first assignments in the lab section of that course was to dissect a frog. The students sat at a long table on which were a number of large bell jars. Inside each jar was a live specimen - in other words, a frog. My live specimen was active and intelligent. It hopped from one side to the other of the jar and pressed its face against the surface, its big bulgy eyes staring at me. I felt that it liked and trusted me and I immediately formed a bond with it.
Immediately on the table in front of me was another, less fortunate, specimen, a sister or a cousin to the one in the jar. The table specimen was fastened to a board with pins, and it was already a goner. It had been "pithed" by the instructor with a long needle. That was the one I was supposed to dissect. The student next to me was a frail girl, surely not cut out for this kind of work, I thought, but she had her sleeves rolled up and insisted that she could do her own "pithing." She plunged right into her frog, wielding the scalpel with cheerful enthusiasm. On the other side of me was a big strapping fellow. He also had his sleeves rolled up with a pack of cigarettes tucked under his muscular t-shirt sleeve. He picked up the scalpel, bent over his frog, raised his scalpel -- and then passed out.
I surveyed the scene. My female partner was already doing a heart transplant and my macho partner with the muscular arms was sitting quietly in a corner, dreaming of a peaceful meadow somewhere. That left me, and I hadn't even begun the assignment.
I picked up the sharp, glittering scalpel, mentally drew a line where I would make the first cut, looked in the lab manual to be sure it was right, and turned toward my specimen. I might have been all right but I chanced to look up at the bell jar, and saw my victim's cousin or sister pressed against the side of the jar, staring at me with a soulful look that reminded me of an aunt on my father's side of whom I had always been fond.
I could not make that first cut. My enthusiastic partner had already neatly isolated all the organs and vessels in her frog and was waiting for the instructor to approve. She was bored and disdainful that I had made no progress.
"Barbara," I said, "I can't seem to get the hang of this. Could you help me out?"
She pushed me out of the way and assumed command, humming to herself with enthusiasm. She didn't even look up when I slunk away from the table and out of the room, careful not to look at the specimen in the bell jar as I fled.
That was the end of my career as a medical student. I flunked the course. Next semester the macho fellow and I took the course again, but we pretended not to recognize each other.
