Letters 11 Part 1
Life at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1944
[With the work load at medical school, the letters become few and shorter.]
January 23, 1944
If you only knew how often I think of home! I refuse to call it homesickness, but now that I'm in the most foreign place I have even been, I think back to India and wonder if my life there was real or just a haunting dream.
We have had a big snow. It lasted four days and beautified this ugly neighborhood by rounding off the sharp edges of rock and concrete. Then one day came a heavy fog from the Bay, thick and clammy and cold enough to give sub-goose pimples to a rabbi!
We are nearing the end of a thoroughly fascinating two months of school. The work is not hard, but there simply isn't enough time to absorb all the information we are faced with. It's inspiring to study under truly great professors. who are not only authorities in their respective fields, but practicing authorities as well.
Let me tell you how the day goes. Bob and I get up at eight these days and go down the block for breakfast. While we are out a ghost women cleans our rooms. We start Anatomy at 9 and work until 1 p.m. An instructor comes to our tables to see how we are doing and answer our questions, if any.
At 2 we attend lectures by prominent men, often Europeans with potent accents who come here to use our excellent research facilities. Three days a week for 3-hour periods we examine tissues under the 'scopes. This Histology course is not very exciting but basic.
Friday we worked on a cat patient. Three hours previously it had been fed cream. We anesthetized it, opened the abdominal walls and examined the mesentery, the lining holding the intestines. We could see the thin white lines of the cream-gorged lymphatic vessels, and it was fascinating to watch the pulsation of arteries in the abdomen, so different in the living animal, and beautiful too.
About 5 p.m. we go to our rooms for a break before supper. Then more study until midnight or later, punctuated by coffee and a walk in the fresh air around 10 o'clock.
There is so much to tell you I feel frustrated! The only remedy, I suppose, is to write oftener.
August 28, 1944
I'm spending a rare holiday at Norfolk with John to celebrate the end of my first year. I came down with my roommate Bob Faulconer who lives just across the James River at Hilton Village.
The four days' exams were nothing less than an ordeal but it even worse waiting for the results to come out. We have heard that we passed; that is all. No grades are over given at Hopkins. The poor student receives no indication all year of whether he is doing well or poorly, so of course as the end approaches he fears the worst.
It seems our standing is based more on the instructor's estimate of us from personal contacts. It's our attitudes and medical aptitudes that count rather than a certain body of information we have absorbed.
But how can one be sure he has sufficiently impressed his instructors! Mrs. Faulconer's oft repeated assurance keep me alive in that slough of despond until news of our passing came. But you should have seen Bob! He was so sunk nothing at all could lift his spirits.
It was good to visit in Bob's home for a few days. His folks treated us like kings and let us eat and sleep all we wanted to. Hilton is not far from Williamsburg, the old Colonial capital of America. Bob's fiancée who lives there showed us about the place.
I was interested in the very old Bruton Parish Church. Grandmother Howard had told me of some of our ancestors originating in this part of the country, and sure enough, I found their names. On the door of one of the a church pews was inscribed "Sir John Randolph, vestryman 1724. Edmund Randolph, Peyton Randolph, vestryman 1744". (Grandmother Howard was a Randolph.) [It turns out that after some research that we Howards are related to Randolphs but not the famous ones noted above – REH]
In spite of all the hard work and anxiety I feel this has been one of the most progressive years of my life. This novice had to learn to pick from an enormous mess of medical knowledge what he thought was important to know first. He had to dive into the vast middle of things and either swim or drown.
How is one to determine what is vital to know first? By some sixth sense he must find out somehow what it is he wants to learn. It's up to him to do all the asking, the searching, the pursuing. He has to develop his own interests and graduate as a doctor who knows something because he has been keen enough to leave no stone unturned.
We don't have time to learn all we might but the instructors inspire us to do our best. The school has this tradition that though they develop men under hardship, they turn out their doctors as professors, and their nurses as doctors!
John and I have talked a lot about India-- as always. As an architect he is interested in mission buildings. He even thought of designing a new type of village as a thesis for his degree. Architecture is so much more than building houses as Medicine is so much more than building hospitals. I firmly believe one needs to begin at the village level to show people how to live, in America as well as India.
Thanks for sending the lovely amethyst ring for Tissie. I gave it to her when she graduated from Baylor and she was thrilled with the token from India. Surprise! she has landed a job here in Baltimore as right-hand woman to the manager of Eastern Air lines. We have no plans for marriage yet, but when I do marry it'll be some woman, and right now Tissie looks like the one. But there are three more years before this hermit crab can take the final step, or, shall we say, crawl!
The future stands all unknown but how can I fear when the same Jesus who has been with me all along is with me still? I have so often sinned and made foolish mistakes but this I know: I have chosen to belong to Him and serve Him so I cannot go wrong if I stay close to Him.
I was so glad to get news of Bill's arrival in India. I suppose he'll try for leave from his air-sea-rescue duty to visit you. He's got a big job patrolling the oceans of Southeast Asia. Tell him for me he's blinking lucky to be that near home.