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| The type of artistry that Professor Cecil Erskine's painted of Versalius' diagram's that adorned the panels surrounding the theatre |
Medical School. Day 1.
Nineteen years old and here I was.
Medical School. Day one!
The University environment was not strange to me, I’d spent two years doing ‘pre-med’. The medical school at Trinity College, Dublin, which was founded in 1711, was the venue in which
we studied the basic sciences of chemistry, physics, botany and zoology.
We were privileged, even at this stage to have been instructed by some of the leading scientists in each of those disciplines.
Ernest Walton, nobel laureate, deigned to educate us first year medical students in physics.
Bronte Gatenby. James, (Golgi body discoverer) was an eminent zoologist, of the famous literary family, the Brontes.
Gatenby Peter - James' son. Ireland’s first full time professor of Internal Medicine.
(In those days a Professorships were rare and meant something, unlike N.America, where it means little more than teacher.)
Men, with international reputations, bothered to teach, pre-medical students, the lowest form of academic life.
I suspect that they recognized that the most important thing they could do was teach and inspire a bunch of
kids to study science and what honorable human behavior was in relation to science and medicine.
Don’t get me wrong, there were almost as many fakes, frauds and
con men around then as now, but it was much harder to get away with it. When they were caught, there were dire consequences.
But I diverge, Trinity College, Dublin, in the sixties
was still one of the notable European seats of knowledge, comparable to Oxford and to
Cambridge, and was educating many of the future world leaders and scientists, as it had done for several centuries.
Here I was, a nice son of an upholsterer eking out a living, starting his medical studies at Trinity College, Dublin
The anatomy lecture theatre at Trinity College Dublin, was an impressive sight for a young man (see above picture).
The terraced layers of seats were numbered, so that should a student be absent, it was immediately apparent.
The walls of the huge lecture theatre, were adorned with large
hand painted reproductions of the great sixteenth century Anatomist,
Andreas Versalius, still recognized as the father of modern anatomy.
His book, 'De humini corporus fabrica', was fully illustrated with
drawings of his own dissections of the human body and his erudition and
artistic genius are unequaled.
The paintings around the lecture theatre, were painted by our anatomy
professor, a gifted artist, who would draw such beautiful illustrations
on a blackboard, with multi-coloured chalks, that we hated to see them
erased at the end of the lecture.
If only we all had smart-phones with quality cameras to capture those educational and artistic diagrams for posterity!
There I sat, placed under S, as our seats were allocated based on our initials. To my left, Spencer, to my right Stavely O’Carroll.
Brian Spencer, to my
left, was an unexceptional pleasant young Englishman with not quite the right accent
for the Trinity Anglo-Irish, who, in those days were proud of their Protestant British
upper class origins even though most of them were born in Ireland.
His main claim to fame was that somewhere in the North of England,
from whence he came, he had an old Bentley car, that he liked to refer to whenever the opportunity arose. To someone like myself, whose main ambition was to get
a small engine that drove two hundred mile
per gallon, screwed onto his pedal bike, owning any sort of car was near miraculous.,
On the other hand, to my right, sat the very exceptional Maud Stavely O’Carroll, who was to become one of my closest friends.
She turned out to be one of the most remarkable women I ever met.
She was one of perhaps a dozen women in our class of about
eighty, she looked terribly old (to me) and she was about six months
pregnant! She was the proto- type of the liberated woman, before that term had even been invented, had three young children and one on the way and a husband who was a doctor in the Canadian Air Force. Their agreement was that once he graduated and started earning she would commence medical school. They were both Irish Catholic, who attended. Trinity College, a staunchly British foundation. In those days the Catholic church frowned on Catholics going to Trinity, and I remember Maud telling me of a visit by her parish priest, who told her she was a poor Catholic for going to Trinity, instead of University College, Dublin, the Catholic University. Maud was not a woman to be intimidated by anyone and continued on in her own determined way.
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