So, let me illustrate from personal experience what this story is all about. Joe Oyster was far and
away the number one man in our Stanford medical class of 60 .We had just gone through some kind of a
mock graduation typical of the war years, and were walking away on our way home. I said to Joe,
“I want you to know what a joy it has been to have had these years together. You have always been
number one, and without pretense, and the rest of us have so much enjoyed the way you have used your
photographic mind to give the right answers but also to really give the lesser profs fits as you
parroted un indecipherable chapter in some text, say from a psychiatric report, and the professor
bit, We knew the game you were playing.”
Joe looked up (he was about 5’5”) and said “Dick, it isn’t what it seems. My photographic memory
is a tremendous limitation. I have never had to think, and therefore really don’t know how.
On the other hand, you with your so-called dumb questions will be a truly creative doctor.
I will try to be a good one, but will never know what I am missing”.
So, that pretty well states what I am trying to explain. The problem is that my kind of doctor
is rare and becoming even more rare, because in meeting the necessity of providing medical care,
and in the face of the numbers hoping to go to medical school, the system of identifying the
“chosen” requires the use of written testing, almost exclusively, in place of the personal
interviews that governed choices up to the end of WWII. And there seems nothing in place
that will change this pattern. But there are still individuals out there who can combine
their algebraic talents, if they are guided and encouraged to use them, in combination
with a memorization process. As I compose here, it becomes ever clearer that it is my
intent to encourage the Discoverer to be willing to adapt memorization, difficult as
it might seem, as a stepping stone in the process of Discovery.
In other words, don’t fight it it. Join it as I did as a temporary expedient and get
on with the action. For it is in the action that the joy of helping lies.
And a final point. We recognize that medicine is making advances. A few are quite
wonderful, especially in the fields relating to leukemia and lymphoma, but then
we come to a halt. What seems to be progress is really advancements in “materials”,
supplied by the manufacturing world. So, doesn’t logic suggest that the physician-engineer
can be a key to future progress as he or she applies algabraic principles to track,
understand, and contain disease, always searching to define the problem.
Next page: The Open Mind
Introduction
Gifts from Inheritance
Gifts from Inheritance, page 2
Gifts from Inheritance, page 3
The Open Mind
The Transition..? Metamorphosis.
The Process of Getting There
1947....Discovery #1....A Beginning
Discovery #2 (1947): Thrombophlebitis and Pulmonary Embolism Prevention