Medical student life, 1944-49

Here are a few brief excerpts from a longer account of my medical school years in Adelaide, 1944-49

In February 1944 when I was not yet 17½ years old, I started "first-year medicine" at the University of Adelaide. This was a premedical year - physics, chemistry, botany, zoology. It was intended to weed out the unworthy and to orient to biological science those like me with no prior exposure to these disciplines or their terminology. It was very necessary for me  so I could learn the bewildering technical jargon of the biological sciences. This was new and strange enough to cause me such difficulty that in the term examination in botany with all its exotic terminology, I achieved the lowest mark I have ever recorded, 4%; I was depressed about my prospects of ever being able to understand what was going on, let alone mastering enough to pass an examination. Fortunately, after a year of dissecting dogfish, gazing at strange patterns of cells and tissues through the lens of a microscope, and listening to interminable lectures (many read from textbooks at dictation speed) enough facts and understanding penetrated my brain and I was able to scrape through and move on to the second year, when the real medical course began with anatomy, biochemistry and physiology.

Cloisters in Student Union building, University of Adelaide, c1945

Adelaide University had some competent and famous scholars in the disciplines that made up those first year courses. Our professor of physics, Kerr Grant, a lovable man with a cleft palate, was the survivor of a team that had included William and Lawrence Bragg, father and son, who were Nobel laureates in physics earlier in the century. The department of zoology was headed by Sir Douglas Mawson, a famous Antarctic explorer, who lived near our old home at Brighton; his daughter's PhD dissertation had been on the rectal parasites of penguins, about which she tried vainly to teach us. In the department of botany (later at the Waite Agricultural Research Centre) was Leonard Marsden, who became famous for his discovery of trace element deficiencies in soil that impaired the metabolism of plants, including those vital to the growth of sheep and cattle. All this erudition was wasted on our pragmatic medical student classes.

  

In our second year we were joined by several ex-servicemen, raising the number in our class to an unprecedented 60, including a record number of women, 15. No medical student class ever before in Adelaide had exceeded 45 students nor had more than 3 or 4 women; all the ‘men’ agreed it was a waste of rigorously rationed medical school places, as these frivolous ‘girls’ would marry and drop out of medical practice. In those days we were strident male chauvinists. In fact, 40 years later all but one or two of the women were still active, and a higher proportion than among the men had become distinguished specialists in fields that include neurosurgery, plastic surgery, anesthetics and radiotherapy. The men included three who died young and violently within five years of graduating - by suicide, drug overdose and traffic injury that was as near self-inflicted as semantics permit. We were joined too by several Western Australians; there was then no medical school in that state, so students from the West aspiring to a medical career had to travel to Adelaide or even further to Melbourne or Sydney. My mother rented our former maid's room to one of them, and later when he moved to the University residence of St Mark's, she rented to one of the ex-servicemen.

Anatomy was hard grind but biochemistry, taught without perceptible attention to underlying theories or principles, was worse. We “learnt” about the Krebs Cycle, the basic principle of carbohydrate metabolism, not by rationally grasping and understanding the principles, but by rote learning. Only physiology, under benign guidance, was enjoyable and seemed to have a rational underlying basis of natural laws like the principle of homeostasis that made sense. Our professor of anatomy was an active research worker with little interest or competence in teaching. Our real anatomy teachers were young medical graduates almost all en route towards surgical careers, keen to enhance their understanding before taking the anatomy examination that was part of the primary FRCS they all required. All but one: the exception was Ross Adey, who became an eminent neurophysiologist and medical scientist, illustrious enough to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize. Ross taught me most of the anatomy that stuck to my brain long enough for me to pass the examinations and proceed on to the clinical years, though it was a close run thing because of the combination of poor comprehension and my distraction from study by extracurricular interests, of which more below.  Many years later Ross Adey and I were expert witnesses in a class action suit against a Californian electric power corporation being sued by people who claimed that low intensity radiation from high voltage power lines caused a cluster of cases of child malignancies. Ross presented the neuropathological evidence, I summarized what was then known about the epidemiological evidence, which was circumstantial and suggestive.

The war ended when I was in my second year. We had a spectacular celebration on VE Day, with an impromptu procession through the streets of Adelaide led by an open touring-car remarkably like one frequently seen in newsreel shots of the commanders of the North African campaign. It contained a uniformed officer who bore an uncanny resemblance to the war hero General Bernard Montgomery. This man was a student, an amateur actor, skillfully made up; he fooled much of the population of Adelaide, some of whom really believed that General  Montgomery was leading our victory celebrations. The second victory celebration when the Japanese were defeated in August 1945 was more subdued. The implications of the fact that the Japanese had capitulated after atomic bombs had destroyed two of their cities, were not lost on some of us. Although we felt profound relief that the war was over and most of us felt vengeful towards the Japanese who were getting their just deserts after the atrocities their soldiers had committed, some of us, myself included, had misgivings about this new weapon, reinforced by Albert Einstein’s words when these appeared in our newspapers. We realized that something terribly important had changed forever in the world we lived in.   

I was becoming increasingly aware of the world I lived in at that time. I avidly read news reports and commentaries in our very parochial local newspapers, and in international magazines from Britain and the USA that were available (weeks after they were published) in our local library. When I was in the third year of the medical course I started subscribing to the New Yorker, which I continued for the next ten years or so, and read its excellent articles on the world’s problems, which broadened my horizons immensely. I became increasingly aware of and sensitive about many of these problems. I still have the issue for August 31, 1946, which was entirely devoted to John Hersey’s account of the survivors of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  On the troubled Middle East, I well remember arguing with a classmate about the establishment of Israel; he had served in the Middle East, and was full of admiration for what the Zionists were doing to convert Palestine into a fertile land flowing with milk and honey. Despite my partially Jewish origins, I was deeply concerned about the morality of handing over this land to usurpers who were ejecting by force the families who had lived there for innumerable generations. The bloodshed and oppression of the Palestinians that have followed the formation of Israel in 1947, and the transformation of the Israelis into the international thugs of the Middle East, seem to me now to support the position I argued back in the days just after the end of World War II, when I could see though my classmate could not, that more wars would be caused by the decisions that the new United Nations General Assembly and Security Council were taking in those years I spent getting my clinical training. My Jewish Uncle Lester had a friend, a rabbi I think, who had come back from the Middle East with horrific stories, including one about a massacre he had witnessed, in which a Palestinian family had been brutally slaughtered by the Zionist soldiers (we call them death squads nowadays) who founded the nation-state of Israel. He and Uncle Lester agreed that ultimately no good could come from the violent and brutal founding of a homeland for the Jews in the place where their distant ancestors had lived 2000 years earlier. It would have been better, they agreed, to establish a homeland for the Jews, if there had to be one at all, in Argentina or in the good farming country of Western Victoria.

I actively disliked much of the medical course. It was drudgery and mindless rote learning, taught by pedants. We had no academic clinical departments or professors in those days. The first professor of medicine was appointed the year after I graduated, in time for Peter but not me to benefit from the stimulus he provided. Our clinical teachers were “honoraries,” doctors in private practice who donated a few half-days every week to their charity wards. They varied in quality but hardly any knew how to teach or had the ability to inspire students. Only a few were clinically competent. As I’ve famously said, it took my brain at least five years to recover from the damage inflicted on it by my medical “education.”

One or two of the clinical teachers could guide selected (that is, favourite) students to a level of clinical competence comparable to that achieved by students in good medical schools. Others such as Adelaide's most eminent surgeon, were third rate authoritarian pedants. In my time the University of Adelaide medical school was in a period of decline and stagnation, between a low peak of mediocrity in the 1930s and a higher peak of above-average quality in the late 1950s and subsequently. I spent a great deal of my time in medical school studying entirely non-medical matters - history and English literature in particular. I aspired to be a writer. I was active in writing and helping to edit the university magazine, Phoenix, in which a couple of my short stories appeared. I wrote anonymously (for 3 guineas apiece!) two short stories, now lost without trace, for Men Only, a men's magazine. The loss is inconsequential, those stories are best lost and forgotten, they were awful! I discovered Mary Martin's bookshop, then a small hole-in-the-wall establishment on an upper floor of a building in a lane off Rundle Street, later in its glory days, a grand emporium of books occupying a whole floor in an air-conditioned office building near its original site. Mary Martin was a little brown-skinned woman, Anglo-Indian I think, an arts graduate of the University; the main attraction was Max Harris, Adelaide's enfant terrible of literature, a flamboyant man of letters. He founded the literary magazine, Angry Penguins, which published poems, stories, and literary criticism. Angry Penguins and Max Harris were the targets of a famous literary hoax, when they accepted and published the “posthumous poems” of an entirely imaginary literary genius, Ern Malley, sensuously erotic (for those times) blank verses that were a literary sensation for a few weeks until the hoax was revealed; at the same time the police laid charges of obscenity against the publisher, who was Max Harris. All this happened after I had become a regular fixture at Mary Martin's, drinking coffee, exchanging stimulating conversation with a miscellaneous collection of artists and aspiring artists - most of whom, like me, never got anywhere in the world of arts and letters. There was a film club too, at which we saw the great movies of that and earlier times - the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Max Ophuls, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, John Grierson and of course, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which I saw the week it opened in Adelaide, probably early in 1944, three years after its original release. I became a semi-serious collector of books in those days, and still have some of the books I got from Mary Martin's, along with coffee and conversation, or from Beck's or other bookshops in and around Adelaide. I don’t think I would have survived medical school without those escapes from the grind of incessant study.

There was study too of course, a great deal of it. That was a masochistic period of sitting at my desk within earshot of thousands enjoying themselves. I could hear happy crowds on the beach a few hundred yards away as I sat studying; and in the evenings, the clack of lawn bowls and the conversation of the elderly bowlers on the bowling-green behind our house distracted me.

There's a good photographic record of tennis parties - though more than 60 years later I can't confidently identify all the players!

After the war ended, the air-raid shelter on the far end of the tennis court was done away with. I was thankful that this source of embarrassment, my mother's most ludicrous folly, was gone for good. It left a depression in that corner of the tennis court that took years to elevate to the same level as the rest of the surface, but it was close enough to the base-line so that it seldom came into play. There began then a series of memorable and happy Sunday afternoon tennis parties that punctuated the summer months during the last three years in medical school. These parties were regularly attended by fellow-students and others, including sundry young women, mainly nurses, and a few others who drifted in and out of the group. I went to the movies and occasionally to dances with several of these girls, but all my social encounters were strictly that, totally social, totally non-sexual. Looking back, I wonder whether I was under-sexed or merely naive. Yet comparing notes years later with others who belonged to that social circle, I discovered that they too were wholly innocent in those days. I think we may have been unusual compared to many in that age group at that time.

Of course it was before the Pill, before the era of sexual emancipation. Our tennis parties and other social activities remained platonic at least until we were in our final year, when several began experimenting a little more boldly, and engagements and weddings began to occur. In my case, sexual exploration consisted, when I was past my 21st birthday, of actually feeling a girl's breasts for the first time in my life; and that, for some years, was as far as my sexual life ever got. But we all had a great deal of fun and many very happy times, memorable occasions that are memorable not least because of their innocence and ordinariness.

Our horizons were limited by the shortage of petrol which was still rationed until a couple of years after the war ended. By then my Auntie Doris had come to live with us. She lived in the front room off the veranda, the room that had been our sitting-room; she had cancer and soon became bed-ridden. She had a little car, a Ford Prefect; and by default this became my wheels, providing my means of escape once petrol rationing ended. That was when I was in my final year, and I didn't get the car very often because my mother also used it instead of her own. Now at last I was able to do what young men of spirit aspired to do - take girls out in the car, and sit smooching with them in the back seat, looking down from the hills on the lights of Adelaide on balmy evenings. But I was unadventurous by the standards that seem to have existed at that time according to popular fiction and Hollywood movies about those times.

A beery excursion to the Flinders Ranges north of Adelaide in about 1948

A few times late in our medical student days, some of us went uninvited to parties, and one of those provided me with what may have been the most romantic episode of my life at that time. The party was somebody's 21^st birthday celebration, and it was irretrievably dull. I was talking quietly to a young woman, probably a few years older than I, in a corner. On the spur of the moment, we decided to leave, and drove up into the hills in my car. We left the party about 10.30 pm, and drove to the lookout just below the summit, where we sat talking - reconstructing the universe, talking of books we had read, movies we had seen, our favourite music, things we liked to do. There was no sex, just wonderful stimulating conversation till the small hours near dawn, when I took her home and deposited her safely on her doorstep with just one chaste goodnight kiss. I didn't even know her name, and I never saw her again. What a pity that was! Of all the people I had ever met, this was perhaps my true soul-mate.

In residence - I think during our final student year