The Cast of Characters Who Teach Us in Med School
This is nothing new for my fellow classmates, but for those friends of mine who aren't in med school (if I have any left), here is a little treat for you. Hopefully I won't get a negative non-cog for this.
Dr. Soulsby.
First in the list, because he's the easiest. He's a person a screenwriter would invent for a movie set in backwoods Arkansas in the 1950s, instead of someone who was legitimately born from a woman's womb. He's average height, gray haired, blue-eyed, and speaks quickly with a loud, booming voice. A third year told me that he tried to become an MD but failed, so he became a PhD and has had it out for med students ever since. I don't quite buy it, but it does illustrate the angry passion he has in his voice as he lectures.
Dr. Soulsby must moonlight as a Pentecostal Revival preacher, touring the countryside in the summers to lecture, I mean preach, to crowds in folding chairs under white tents in the middle of a pasture. It's with this same passion that he lectures to a crowd of med students with their Boulevard Bread Co. coffee cups and their laptops who are seriously holding their breath for a few years before life moves on.
His lectures go something along the lines of:
"You don't know that Cardiac Output is equal to Heart Rate times Stroke Volume?! You're going to fail the NBME! Is pressure higher in the aorta or the lower arteries? The aorta! WAIT, No! You think it is, but you're wrong! It's the arteries!" (Thanks, we just wrote aorta down in our notes...in pen.)
From this, one can take a very small step in the imagination to the Pentecostal preacher. For the more mathematically minded reader, I'll provide a series of values to substitute into the equation:
Cardiac Output = Jesus Christ
Heart Rate times Stroke Volume = your living savior
Fail the NBME = Go to hell
For those readers not mathematically minded, imagine a man in a button up oxford, maybe with red gridlines, a long white coat, gray hair in a buzz cut, standing stiff as a 2x4, and yelling loudly, with a red face and a southern accent on a hot summer day, "You don't know that Jesus Christ is your living savior! You're going to go to hell! What's going to get you to heaven? Good Deeds! But no! You think it is, but you're wrong! It's Jesus Christ!" The vein in his forehead is popping out as he says it, and scarily, he knows exactly why its popping out, and he'll tell you, too.
Dr. Chang.
Our beloved Neuroscience professor, a mild mannered Asian who knows everything there is to know about Neuroscience. He's also the only professor in medical school who doesn't use a PowerPoint presentation, which means students who skip class aren't so easily taken care of as with other professors, but a welcome relief for the regular class attenders. Dr. Chang will tell jokes in the midst of his lectures, and draws sketches of spinal cords, nerves, and pathways, only to end the illustration with a crazy cartoon head on top of the spinal cord. A close look at him will reveal that he does indeed have a fairly significant five o'clock shadow. Tall and thin, he ambles around the lab, and will sit down and show you everything you need to know on the brain you're examining before walking on, his head slightly tilted up and his hands clasped behind his back.
Dr. Pasley.
Our physiology course director is a hoot and a half. He's written several review books for physiology, and a large set of review questions. This bald, upper middle-aged thin man will get up in class and lecture, telling bad jokes that everyone appreciates, but ends it with blotting his bald forehead with his tie in a rather effeminate gesture that not even Jon Stewart had mastered. As people e-mail him with questions regarding the exam, he sends the replies back with: you need to know blah blah blah and blah blah, but remember, read each question carefully and choose the ONE best answer, as if we've never taken a multiple choice test before our second semester here. During the ECG lab, he gets a little nervous as a female student tries to hook up the electrodes on herself under her shirt, and keeps prompting the other females in the room to "take her to the restroom to help her out" as he goes a little pale at the thought of a female student on a table in her bra.
Dr. Skinner.
The bumbling neuroscience course director. Gray haired, older, he wears a big sweater under his white coat, much like Mr. Rogers, but with the thick glasses. He comes into class one day and says "Are you excited to be here? You've worked all your lives to be here," he continues, "why aren't you excited to be here?"
It's 9 am, sir. No, we're not excited to be here. We didn't finish studying what we needed to last night despite staying up until 4 am, and now we're here in a dark auditorium, trying to learn more stuff. Just give us the info so we can go take a nap before we have to tear apart a dead guy in gross anatomy.
He likes to make a big deal about not coming to class, a nearly unnecessary event in the age of PowerPoint presentations and Wikipedia. God bless the internet. Afterward that rant, he'll lecture on and on and on, telling you "that these fibers come from...oh, what are those things called?" There's an awkward, 25 second pause, before" "Oh, nerves!" He'll stumble over concepts, as he lectures, occasionally going back five powerpoint slides as realizes he's made an error. (Thanks, we already wrote that down in our notes...in pen, again!) He has major technical difficulties going over our quizes each Wednesday in Neuroscience lab, as he tries to go back to the beginning of a PowerPoint presentation.
Dr. Childs.
How we miss our Nana. She was our Microanatomy course director, a lady who babied us to no end. She spoon-fed us, and we loved her for it. Her lectures were clear and to the point. Her test questions followed suit. She gave us a syllabus with a course objective, saying what we should know from each lecture. Simply answering every question in the syllabus was enough to give us an astronomically high average on the NBME for microanatomy and cell and a good round of As for our transcripts.
Dr. Burns.
Everyone speaks of Dr. Burns as a wonderful teacher, and God knows, my mother loved him back in the day when he taught her. But then, he also bought some beagle puppies from my parents sometime around 1970, so go figure. He doesn't appear to be that old, with his gray hair restricted to his beard, his thick brown hair, and red baby face. Tall and portly, he gets up and lectures on the embyrology of the heart, going through it saying "and now, the wall comes down, like a garage door, and you knock a little cat door through it so you can get your M&Ms (the green ones are my favorite), and then this tube comes out, like tube of wrapping paper, and it's like a credit card goes through the slot, and it twists and..."
The class is left wondering, "What do M&Ms and a cat door have to do with the fetal heart?"
Dr. Tank.
The God of Gross Anatomy. Legend has it that when he was a fledgling anatomy student, he only missed one question out of all of his tests. Apparently it was some nerve in the nose. As Dr. Tank wrote our dissector, it is appropriately not mentioned, because Dr. Tank is "not convinced it's there."
Now, our Dissector might be titled Grant's Dissector, because once a man named Grant wrote it, but then Dr. Tank edited the 13th edition. Unfortunately, the people who publish the Bible trademarked the idea of having everything said by Jesus in red, or else there would be some red print in the Grant's Dissector.
Dr. Tank stands in the lab, with his red fleece collar turned up underneath the white coat, he comes around and will help you if you need it. However, if you're so lucky to have a group who cracks jokes all the time, and Dr. Tank happens to come up when one of your group members is talking about Albanians and polka, you'll not see him again for the rest of the lab, despite the fact that there is supposed to be nerve under the parotid gland that you cannot find and it's getting scarily close to 5:00. And if you bash the University of Michigan's sports teams, you'll never see him for the entirety of gross anatomy, and you just might fail.
Dr. Soulsby.
First in the list, because he's the easiest. He's a person a screenwriter would invent for a movie set in backwoods Arkansas in the 1950s, instead of someone who was legitimately born from a woman's womb. He's average height, gray haired, blue-eyed, and speaks quickly with a loud, booming voice. A third year told me that he tried to become an MD but failed, so he became a PhD and has had it out for med students ever since. I don't quite buy it, but it does illustrate the angry passion he has in his voice as he lectures.
Dr. Soulsby must moonlight as a Pentecostal Revival preacher, touring the countryside in the summers to lecture, I mean preach, to crowds in folding chairs under white tents in the middle of a pasture. It's with this same passion that he lectures to a crowd of med students with their Boulevard Bread Co. coffee cups and their laptops who are seriously holding their breath for a few years before life moves on.
His lectures go something along the lines of:
"You don't know that Cardiac Output is equal to Heart Rate times Stroke Volume?! You're going to fail the NBME! Is pressure higher in the aorta or the lower arteries? The aorta! WAIT, No! You think it is, but you're wrong! It's the arteries!" (Thanks, we just wrote aorta down in our notes...in pen.)
From this, one can take a very small step in the imagination to the Pentecostal preacher. For the more mathematically minded reader, I'll provide a series of values to substitute into the equation:
Cardiac Output = Jesus Christ
Heart Rate times Stroke Volume = your living savior
Fail the NBME = Go to hell
For those readers not mathematically minded, imagine a man in a button up oxford, maybe with red gridlines, a long white coat, gray hair in a buzz cut, standing stiff as a 2x4, and yelling loudly, with a red face and a southern accent on a hot summer day, "You don't know that Jesus Christ is your living savior! You're going to go to hell! What's going to get you to heaven? Good Deeds! But no! You think it is, but you're wrong! It's Jesus Christ!" The vein in his forehead is popping out as he says it, and scarily, he knows exactly why its popping out, and he'll tell you, too.
Dr. Chang.
Our beloved Neuroscience professor, a mild mannered Asian who knows everything there is to know about Neuroscience. He's also the only professor in medical school who doesn't use a PowerPoint presentation, which means students who skip class aren't so easily taken care of as with other professors, but a welcome relief for the regular class attenders. Dr. Chang will tell jokes in the midst of his lectures, and draws sketches of spinal cords, nerves, and pathways, only to end the illustration with a crazy cartoon head on top of the spinal cord. A close look at him will reveal that he does indeed have a fairly significant five o'clock shadow. Tall and thin, he ambles around the lab, and will sit down and show you everything you need to know on the brain you're examining before walking on, his head slightly tilted up and his hands clasped behind his back.
Dr. Pasley.
Our physiology course director is a hoot and a half. He's written several review books for physiology, and a large set of review questions. This bald, upper middle-aged thin man will get up in class and lecture, telling bad jokes that everyone appreciates, but ends it with blotting his bald forehead with his tie in a rather effeminate gesture that not even Jon Stewart had mastered. As people e-mail him with questions regarding the exam, he sends the replies back with: you need to know blah blah blah and blah blah, but remember, read each question carefully and choose the ONE best answer, as if we've never taken a multiple choice test before our second semester here. During the ECG lab, he gets a little nervous as a female student tries to hook up the electrodes on herself under her shirt, and keeps prompting the other females in the room to "take her to the restroom to help her out" as he goes a little pale at the thought of a female student on a table in her bra.
Dr. Skinner.
The bumbling neuroscience course director. Gray haired, older, he wears a big sweater under his white coat, much like Mr. Rogers, but with the thick glasses. He comes into class one day and says "Are you excited to be here? You've worked all your lives to be here," he continues, "why aren't you excited to be here?"
It's 9 am, sir. No, we're not excited to be here. We didn't finish studying what we needed to last night despite staying up until 4 am, and now we're here in a dark auditorium, trying to learn more stuff. Just give us the info so we can go take a nap before we have to tear apart a dead guy in gross anatomy.
He likes to make a big deal about not coming to class, a nearly unnecessary event in the age of PowerPoint presentations and Wikipedia. God bless the internet. Afterward that rant, he'll lecture on and on and on, telling you "that these fibers come from...oh, what are those things called?" There's an awkward, 25 second pause, before" "Oh, nerves!" He'll stumble over concepts, as he lectures, occasionally going back five powerpoint slides as realizes he's made an error. (Thanks, we already wrote that down in our notes...in pen, again!) He has major technical difficulties going over our quizes each Wednesday in Neuroscience lab, as he tries to go back to the beginning of a PowerPoint presentation.
Dr. Childs.
How we miss our Nana. She was our Microanatomy course director, a lady who babied us to no end. She spoon-fed us, and we loved her for it. Her lectures were clear and to the point. Her test questions followed suit. She gave us a syllabus with a course objective, saying what we should know from each lecture. Simply answering every question in the syllabus was enough to give us an astronomically high average on the NBME for microanatomy and cell and a good round of As for our transcripts.
Dr. Burns.
Everyone speaks of Dr. Burns as a wonderful teacher, and God knows, my mother loved him back in the day when he taught her. But then, he also bought some beagle puppies from my parents sometime around 1970, so go figure. He doesn't appear to be that old, with his gray hair restricted to his beard, his thick brown hair, and red baby face. Tall and portly, he gets up and lectures on the embyrology of the heart, going through it saying "and now, the wall comes down, like a garage door, and you knock a little cat door through it so you can get your M&Ms (the green ones are my favorite), and then this tube comes out, like tube of wrapping paper, and it's like a credit card goes through the slot, and it twists and..."
The class is left wondering, "What do M&Ms and a cat door have to do with the fetal heart?"
Dr. Tank.
The God of Gross Anatomy. Legend has it that when he was a fledgling anatomy student, he only missed one question out of all of his tests. Apparently it was some nerve in the nose. As Dr. Tank wrote our dissector, it is appropriately not mentioned, because Dr. Tank is "not convinced it's there."
Now, our Dissector might be titled Grant's Dissector, because once a man named Grant wrote it, but then Dr. Tank edited the 13th edition. Unfortunately, the people who publish the Bible trademarked the idea of having everything said by Jesus in red, or else there would be some red print in the Grant's Dissector.
Dr. Tank stands in the lab, with his red fleece collar turned up underneath the white coat, he comes around and will help you if you need it. However, if you're so lucky to have a group who cracks jokes all the time, and Dr. Tank happens to come up when one of your group members is talking about Albanians and polka, you'll not see him again for the rest of the lab, despite the fact that there is supposed to be nerve under the parotid gland that you cannot find and it's getting scarily close to 5:00. And if you bash the University of Michigan's sports teams, you'll never see him for the entirety of gross anatomy, and you just might fail.