2024 RICHARD SPEAR , MD , MEMORIAL ESSAY CONTEST Practicing & Life Member Category Winner
2024 RICHARD SPEAR , MD , MEMORIAL ESSAY CONTEST Practicing & Life Member Category Winner
If I Weren ’ t a Doctor , I ’ d Be an Archaeologist by MORRIS WEISS , MD
In August 1951 , I found myself in Ann Arbor , enrolled as a University of Michigan freshman to study medicine . My roommate and I were assigned to the just-completed South Quad at the edge of the main campus . For one week I had no clothes since my trunk from Louisville was lost in the Ann Arbor train station . About a hundred yards from the South Quad was a dark granite building probably built in the late nineteenth century . Besides classrooms , this musty old building was crowded with glass cabinets filled with artifacts from archaeology digs . I did not realize at that time how interested I was in history .
My father being a prominent physician in Louisville , and me with a draft number of 5 and the Korean war raging , together meant that studying hard as a greasy-grind pre-med student was my only real option . I snuck in a few history courses that I loved , and to my amazement in those classes I always got an A . I had to aim for A ’ s in all my classes , though . The better grades you got , and the more likely you were to go to med school , the less likely it was that you would be drafted . Without that pressure , I might have taken even more of those history classes I loved and ended up becoming an historian or an archaeologist .
After three years at Michigan , I returned to Louisville and in 1958 graduated from the University of Louisville School of Medicine as class president . To my surprise I was accepted at America ’ s first hospital , The Pennsylvania Hospital , founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1752 . The next year I was a Fellow in Hypertension at the University of Pennsylvania ’ s academic teaching hospital .
Academic life at Penn was stressful , so I applied to be a doctor on a transatlantic cruise ship . Suddenly , however , I was awarded a twoyear program in Internal Medicine at Barnes Hospital Washington University in St . Louis , and I accepted . My life had surprised me with these twists , but they were all in the field of medicine , which was my destiny .
By 1961 , I was married with one son and another on the way , scheduled to treat Navajo Indians in New Mexico , when my father had a coronary three months before my tenure at Barnes was completed . His health was poor , and I decided to come home . On June 26 , 1962 , I rolled into Louisville with a two-year-old and a pregnant wife and began practice the next morning . Seven months later , while talking to a patient , my father suddenly died . I bought the practice from my mother , sister and brother and the practice continued to grow .
Five years later , President Nixon bombed Hanoi and 850 doctors were drafted on Christmas Day , 1967 . I actually had been drafted twice before , the first time when President Kennedy began the Berlin airlift . I was an intern at The Pennsylvania Hospital , holding a retractor for the Chief of Surgery doing a big stomach resection case . The hospital administrator came into the operating room , tapped me on the shoulder , and said , “ Break scrub , you ’ ve just been drafted .” Two hours later I was standing in a line with about 15 other draftees , with all my belongings in a small black bag in one hand . Soon I heard , “ Bend over ,” and a doctor , gloved hand and jellied finger aimed at my rear end , said , “ You are about to become the United States Army ’ s soldier .” I went back to being an intern and never heard from them again . The second draft came in 1961 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident . Both times I was drafted but never activated , until 1967 .
20 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE