Transcript: Tape 4 Side A
DATE: March 10, 1998/ March 12, 1998
TAPE: Tape 4
INTERVIEWEE: Thomas Scully, M.D.
INTERVIEWER: Eileen Barker
PLACE: Dr. Scully's home, 1400 Ferris Lane in Reno
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: Teresa Garrison (Revised 2016, Haley Kovac)
Thomas Scully: I've always felt, as I was saying earlier, Dick Janeway got me interested in pre-med courses. I did well, and so I said 'Well, I'll apply to medical school; if I get accepted, I'll go.' Then I got into medical school, I did fine; I did particularly well in pediatrics, so I ended up going into pediatrics. It's as though…
Eileen Barker: You took it as signs.
TS: It's probably silly to talk that way, but I often saw these as sort of 'this is a sign on a guide post'. You're headed in a direction, you meet with some success, you get some positive feedback and that encourages you to go on. But I don't remember the feeling and I don't think Celia could tell you either; 'cause she and I were dating all through high school and college, we talked on the phone all the time and wrote letters, I don't think I ever had the sense that my life would come to an end if I didn't get into medical school. I never remember thinking 'Oh God, I'll have a nervous breakdown!' I can do other things!
EB: Because you hadn't made your mind up as so many of these kids I heard who came into medical school who said 'Oh God, I've decided this when I was six years old.'
TS: Nor my sons. I don't want to speak for them, but Peter and Chris wandered around into high school and college and finally they applied and they did well. There wasn't this anxiety in my house that if you don't become a doctor, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown and you'll be a failure; and I never as a kid or as a youngster or a college kid ever felt that way.
EB: So you had a second plan of attack, anyway.
TS: Or at least I had a sense that I'll survive doing something. I didn't have a sense that if I don't do this 'I'm dead; I can't go on with life.' I said 'Well, you know, I can do something else.'
EB: I think probably, you must have been pretty happy-go-lucky kid, even with the loss that you suffered.
TS: I'm not sure I'd say happy-go-lucky; but I think, probably from my mother and my older brothers and sisters and all these other people who've helped me along the way, I always had a good self-esteem, a sense of myself. I never felt like a failure when I got an 'F' in German that was just a mistake, screwed up. But I didn't feel like a failure, and that would be the only exception I can think of, everything I tried or took on, I usually succeeded at; with varying degree of work or varying degree of help. And I do not believe, frankly, and I don't feel this about anybody I've ever known, that they did it on their own. I mean, I just don't think that's true. Everybody got help from somebody, either they knew about it or they didn't. Someone had to start the school system, someone had to get people going; in my view no one has ever done anything totally on their own. I think it's silly for people to say that; sure, they worked their ass off, they struggled, they took advantage of all the opportunities, but far as I know, everybody that I've ever known that was successful, got a lot of help from somebody.
EB: Now, where did Dick Janeway go?
TS: Oh, he went to Penn. He went to Penn and married the daughter of one of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Then went from there, like I did, he joined the Air Force 'cause he needed money, he was broke too. His father, I think, was an automobile salesman, no, he actually sold fire engines. He was a relatively poor kid; he came to Colgate on the exact same scholarship I came on and that's how we met, the first day we arrived they put 25 of us in the same room and said 'You're the cream of the crop, we brought you here on scholarships, and we expect great things from you.' And they told us they expected stuff from us.
EB: Where'd he come from?
TS: He came from Merchantville, New Jersey, which is right across the river from Philadelphia, out just past Camden. A modest family, he came there on a scholarship, and so we had a comradery there; neither of us had two nickels to knock together. He might have made money too, doing other things. They'd give us scholarships for tuition and books and that stuff, but the room and board you had to work for. I don't know of anybody who got free room and board; you had to do something, cut grass or some damn thing. So, he and I had a very similar background in that regard, although his parents were alive. Anyway, he went to Penn, then he went into the Air Force; we met several times, he was stationed in England while we were stationed in Madrid, we went to a meeting together in Wiesbaden, Germany and then we had gone to each other's weddings. When he got out of the Air Force, he went back and got his training in neurology, became a neurologist at Bowman Grey and turned out to be appointed the dean there; in Winston-Salem, spent 30 some years there as the dean.
EB: Great friendship. Where did Cecilia go to college?
TS: Celia left Ursuline, same year I left Iona and went to Trinity College. First of all, she went to St. Elizabeth's College in Morristown, New Jersey for two years with several of her classmates; didn't like it and transferred down to Trinity College in Washington D.C., spent her third and fourth year there and graduated from Trinity. Then came back home and worked at the Rockefeller Institute for two years until we could get married and then when we got married; we were two years out of college, I was finishing my second year of medical school, we got married and she moved to Albany. And she worked as the secretary for the dean of the nursing school for year and a half or so, until our first son came along.
EB: You didn't see much of each other during those years.
TS: Not a lot; summers, Christmas, Easter, every vacation.
EB: And letter writing.
TS: And we wrote letters and talked on the phone.
EB: People don't do that anymore, have you noticed that? They don't write letters.
TS: Celia is a letter writer; she's got tons of letters. And when we were in Spain, she wrote letters to her mother, her mother kept every one of them; we got them down in the basement. But Celia's a writer, writing is a way she expresses herself, so she's written several books and hundreds of articles. So, writing has always been important to her.
EB: But you don't hear…
TS: Boyfriends and girlfriends writing.
EB: People today writing letters back and forth, it's the telephone or it's faxes.
TS: Well, that's true. No, we wrote, well, of course, we could, I guess, mail them for a nickel or a dime or seven cents. So, there were big gaps, it was meant to be I guess.
EB: So, when you were married, she was already through college.
TS: She had been working in New York for two years. She worked at the Rockefeller Institute, she had a fascinating job; she worked for D.W. Woolley, who was a biochemist at the Rockefeller who was blind. He went blind because of his diabetes and Celia's job was to read journals to him and to help him with all of his correspondence, but he did his lab work with his technicians and helpers by himself. He knew he was going blind and for a number of years in preparation for his total blindness, had set up his lab in such a way that he could work in his lab, but he couldn't read the journals and most journals weren't in braille and they didn't have talking machines like they have now. So, much of her job, she did secretarial work, but she would file his journal and he'd say 'Yeah, I want the journal that's up on the fourth shelf, that's five over and it's dated December such and such' and she'd pull it down and he'd remember it. He was one of the earliest experimenters, not personally, but with animals with LSD and other drugs and demonstrated their effect upon animals.
EB: I think what we'll do is stop here. We'll put this on hold.
TS: Yeah, sure.
EB: And when we come back, we'll start with your first year in medical school. I want to hear your feelings about that and whether or not you thought you had made a big mistake.
[Both laugh] [Tape stops]
[Tape starts again]
EB: Alright. Today is Thursday, March 12; and we're continuing with this tape, talking to Dr. Scully. Dr. Scully, when we left off last time, we decided to talk about medical school. You told us how you decided to go there and that was through your roommate. Now, Dick Janeway was your roommate in college.
TS: Well, yeah. Roommate and a fraternity brother, actually I guess.
EB: At Sigma Nu.
TS: Right. So, we lived in the same fraternity house for four years essentially.
EB: You said that you had a story you wanted to tell me about, and I don't know if we did cover that.
TS: Yes we did.
EB: Something about Dick Janeway and getting you into medical school.
TS: No, mostly encouraging me to take some pre-med courses and then he helped me through school, I mean a lot of times he would help me with my studies. No, he didn't help me get into medical school, per say, he encouraged me to do that. But Charlie Foster, Dr. Foster, who was the head of the biology department and was the pre-med advisor. He was the one who sort of served as the gate-keeper for pre-meds at Colgate and I forgot the exact figures, I think I said last time, something like 60 freshmen would start out and maybe half of them would get through the four-year pre-med program which was very stringent. It had a reputation at Colgate as being one of the toughest academic programs, but if you got through those four years then he would personally go to bat for you. I remember he would travel around the country every fall and early winter and essentially place all of his students; he called them 'his boys' or 'my boys' and I think everyone in my senior class got into medical school and I think there was some individual judgment by Dr. Foster at that time as to where a particular student might fit in best and in terms of research and that sort of thing. So, it was Dr. Foster who really took me and others under his wing and I give him the credit for that.
EB: You were saying that he called them 'my boys' tells me the answer pretty much to my next question which was, how many women did you have in your class?
TS: Oh no. Colgate was all men then. Colgate did not become co-educational until about 1970.
EB: Oh, we're talking about Colgate. Sorry, I'm confused.
TS: We're talking about Colgate College, undergraduate.
EB: Well, let me ask you then about, medical school. And just rephrase that question, how many women were there?
TS: Very few. I started medical school, I can look it up specifically; I started medical school in the fall of 1954 and there were two women in the sophomore class ahead of us. I can remember specifically because one of my classmates married one of them and there was only one woman; there was only one woman in our medical school class out of an entering class of, I'm guessing, 50-ish. I'd have to look that up and that woman, also she ended up going into pediatrics and married a classmate who was an urologist. So I recall only one woman in my class and two in the class ahead of me. So, in the mid-50's medical school, I think nation-wide, I could look at the statistics, was probably, I don't know, 90 some percent men. But, interestingly, there were several women residents training at the Albany Medical Center when I was there in medical school. Two specifically who had a big influence on me, Mary Voorhees was a resident there, and got me interested in pediatrics and encouraged me in pediatrics. She ultimately went on to become a professor of pediatrics at Syracuse University, but I credit her and a few others for fostering my interest in pediatrics, but we're getting a little ahead of the story. But, there were some women around, but very, very few. Very few.
EB: And this was, as you said, fairly nation-wide?
TS: Oh yeah, I think it was. Except for the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, I think it's called the Medical College of Pennsylvania; in those days it was called Woman's Medical College, and of course that was all women. Now, they take a few men. I guess, statistically, here it is 40 years later and roughly half of 40-50% of most medical school classes around the country are now women.
EB: When did you see that starting to change, toward that trend? You were keeping up on it pretty much all through your…
TS: Yes, I was. Well, remember when we started our medical school here at the University of Nevada in 1971, the first entering class had only one woman; only one woman, Mary Sourwine. And of course, it began to evolve over time and I would guess probably by the early 80's maybe 20% were women and I think most recent classes have been in the 40-50% range.
EB: Yeah, I saw that change too, because when I started up there, those trends were developing; and each year there were more and more women.
TS: And it was also the same time that college education as well as university education was becoming much more co-educational. Traditional all-men schools were entering women and traditional all-women schools were admitting men.
EB: But women were more reluctant, it seemed. They were going to college before this trend in medicine started to change of accepting women; but I think the women were more reluctant a few years back to get into what was always considered a male society.
TS: Although, if you look really back at the turn of the century, before the Flexner era of the 1915 and the change to a university kind of academic environment, women made up a significant percentage of physicians in this country. At the turn of the century, I can look it up, but it was in the range of about 15-20%; but then of course that fell off. But prior to the Flexner era in the early 1900's there were what, 300 medical schools and many of them were proprietary schools that were sort of preceptorships; and it was only after the Flexner Report that several hundred of these small medical schools were closed and it boiled down to something like 65 university based medical schools beginning in the early 1920's. So, there was a period of time when there were lots of women in medicine, but certainly not since the First World War.
EB: Those women, though, primarily they stayed in, what was considered 'women areas'. 'Cause now you have women going into urology.
TS: Orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery.
EB: Those areas that were really men dominated.
TS: That's only been in the last 15 years, you're right.
EB: So you've seen some interesting trends.
TS: Oh sure. Even when I entered Pediatrics, I think it had the highest percentage of women; there were several women in pediatric training with me. So, of those women who went to medical school in the late '40s early '50s, even in the early '60s, many of them went into pediatrics. Then there was, peculiarly, not many went into OB, but many went into pediatrics and internal medicine, but all of that shifted and changed now; now, I don't know the exact figures, but there are many more women across the board.
EB: Well, you graduated traditionally, probably June.
TS: From college, that's right.
EB: And what did you do that summer? Work, no doubt.
TS: Yes, I worked every summer. I'd have to look at that biographical sheet I gave you. Well, the summer after my second year I went to Alaska, the summer after my junior and senior year I worked at the Badger Day Camp, yes it was a day camp in a suburb in Larchmont right next to New Rochelle, as a matter of fact, Jack Collins who ran that camp used to hire girls from Ursuline and boys from Iona when they went on to college; and most of his camp counselors were college kids, most of whom were from the New Rochelle-Larchmont area. And I think actually, before we started medical school, that summer Celia and I spent a lot of time together because we were camp counselors and would see each other every day. At that time the camp was broken up again into boys and girls, using the same facilities, but they'd have what, two or three counselors for a group of 15 or 20 kids.
EB: What kind of a camp was that?
TS: It was a day camp.
EB: Religious?
TS: No, it wasn't. Private; mostly fairly well-to-do parents who were sending their kids to day camp to get them out, something to do. They were all well-to-do kids because it cost a lot of money to send the kids there, and we were paid pretty well. I've forgotten exactly, there might have been 20 male counselors and 20 female counselors for several hundred kids.
EB: Sports, all kinds of activities.
TS: All kinds of sports, and they'd swim, archery, and miniature golf, and I think maybe some would be taken once and awhile, if they wanted to, to horseback ride. It was just a day camp.
EB: So you were paid a salary.
TS: We were paid a salary, oh sure, yeah, sure. Well, I lived at home and I'd get up in the morning and meet the bus and the bus would go around the town and pick up these kids; just like a school bus would do, take them to this day camp. So, I did that and I think that was the last time I ever did that; 'cause once I started medical school then I had usually jobs around the medical school.
EB: Let's talk a little bit about, before we get into medical school, the Alaskan experience. I noticed that was several months into your semester work.
TS: Yeah, it was the end of my second year of college. I was at Colgate and, as I think I said on a previous tape, a fraternity brother and I left school; and as I told you earlier I walked out essentially of the German exam knowing full well I was going to get an 'F' in German and just took off. We headed to Alaska in his car and we drove New York to Anchorage, 5,400 miles in nine days. I'd drive for four hours and he'd sleep and vice versa and we'd stop every second day and find a hotel and get a shower and get a meal and maybe sleep for a few hours. What we essentially did was, we were only two of probably several hundred college kids, most of whom came from the west coast; it was the first time I had talked to anybody who had gone to school in California or Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and lot of them would come up to Alaska every summer and work on the highways. At that time Alaska was not a state it was a territory, Department of the Interior ran it. So what we did is, since you could work almost 24 hours a day; their road crews would essentially work around the clock. They'd be laying gravel and paving and that, so we'd be on shift, maybe an eight to 10 hour shift; driving trucks from the cement plant or the rock plant out and we'd dump them and back and forth and back and forth. That's all we did. I remember we worked around the clock, because we would frequently, if we were on the night shift or what we'd call the swing shift, we'd come back and have dinner and play softball at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and the sun was up. The sun, in the pique of the summer, in July was probably four hours of darkness. So, we'd be playing softball at 10 or 11 o'clock at night or three, four, five in the morning dependent upon what your work schedule was. I must have put on, I've got pictures of myself, 30 pounds, because all we did was eat and sleep; and they'd feed you about four meals a day, a full course meal. I mean breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I don't know how many courses; they just fed all these college kids, we lived in old army barracks on an old army base, it was left over from the Second World War and that's what we did.
EB: Was this a federal subsidy thing?
TS: Yeah, it was federal.
EB: So you were paid by the federal government and then the state of…
TS: No, there was no state. Alaska was not a state then, it was a territory; it was the territory of Alaska and it was managed by the Department of the Interior and they were paving the Alcan Highway, or the American portion, which ended up at the Canadian border and went to Fairbanks and Anchorage. As a matter of fact, much of the highway, from after you left Calgary and Edmonton and headed north there was almost another 1,000 miles through the Yukon that was all gravel. We drove almost 1,000 miles on gravel roads that had been built really during the war to get supplies up to the Aleutians and Alaska during the war when there was always a threat of Japanese invasion but when we went there in the summer of '52, the war was over, what, six or seven years and that road was still gravel. Still gravel.
EB: Oh my. So, you then were stationed outside of Anchorage.
TS: Yeah, in a little town called Glennallen, named for a man, Glennallen I guess. Glennallen was named for the first casualty during the Aleutian campaign; he was an American who got killed.
EB: Aleutian campaign during the war?
TS: During the war there would have been an attempt at an invasion of some of the Aleutians by the Japanese as I recall. I don't know the exact story, but he was an American soldier who was killed. At any rate, that little town is there 'cause it's still the crossroads when you come in from Canada, you either go north, at that point, to Fairbanks or you go southwest to Anchorage or you go south to Valdez. As a matter of fact, Valdez, when they had the terrible oil spill in the Prince Edward Sound.
EB: The Exxon?
TS: Yeah, the Exxon-Valdez, but that little town was a port. There was no oil at the time because the Alaskan pipeline hadn't even been thought of then, but it was a port. We used to go down there on the weekends; it was a little town, with a fishing village essentially, so it was fun. But basically we worked, and slept, and ate and made good money; and turned around at the end of August, I don't remember the exact date, early September and drove all the way back. I think we arrived back in New York a few days before school opened and that's when my mother told me that I had gotten this letter and that I was going to lose my scholarship because I got an 'F' in German and that was the next morning she and I drove up and I've told you that story, went to Colgate and I pleaded and she pleaded. Turned out to be fortuitous because as a result of that disaster for me, I studied night and day in my junior year and got all A's in all the tough pre-med courses and I'm sure that got me into school.
EB: That must have been an interesting experience because I would think this might have been your first exposure to a type of person outside of your own circle really.
TS: It was the first time I had been away from home.
EB: These must have been some rough and tough guys.
TS: Oh they were; they were. The college kids, like myself, who just drove the trucks, we just did what we were told, but the supervisors and the engineers and the road crews and the people that ran it, oh they were rough and tough. I can remember there were local bars where they'd go in on a Saturday night; it was Hollywood movie at its best. I didn't drink, so it never bothered me, but I'd get the hell out of there because someone would have too much to drink and start a bar brawl and you didn't want to be caught; I don't even know if they had police around. It was wild and wooly, but for most of us we were fairly protected; if you wanted to go back to the barracks and go to sleep no one would bother you.
EB: How long did that project take? That was over a couple of years, wasn't it?
TS: Oh the work had been going on several summers before. I think we might have been in the third or fourth summer, because when we got there a lot of it had been done. I think there were still several more years to go because they basically had about three to four months of construction. Essentially, the snow would melt, the rivers and the flooding would stop, and the weather would be good; and so they'd do their paving, I think we got there around the 10th of June. They'd do their paving June, July, August, and September. By September the frost would start coming and everybody headed the hell out, because who wanted to be caught there in the winter time.
EB: Did you have to drive out a long ways every morning, to go to where they were working?
TS: No, because where we were staying in this little town of Glennallen, that's where the barracks were. The trucks would come in there, and that's where we'd all sleep and that's where we'd all eat, and I can remember eating at tables, gosh, some of those tables must have been 20-30 feet long and it must have been 40 kids, 40 young people just devouring this food that was just being put out. We'd go out, put on our jackets, and take our rain gear because it was fairly wet at times and we'd get in our trucks or whatever and we might drive 15-20 miles to wherever they were working for that day or two and then you'd go back home that night. So, it wasn't that long, like any other construction you go out to where they left the trucks. Since they were working around the clock, it was essentially, you'd come, you'd relieve Joe, Joe would go back to eat and sleep for his 12 hours and you'd take over his truck and they'd put in more gas and oil and you'd take off.
EB: As the road progressed further and further away from that spot, you'd move your camp wouldn't you?
TS: No.
EB: You'd move a camp.
TS: No, no. For that summer we just stayed in the same thing, but, yeah, we might drive 20-30 miles to get to work.
EB: And the other thing we started to talk about before was the Colgate Thirteen.
TS: Yes.
EB: Which I found kind of interesting and would be interesting for this book.
TS: It was a men's group, a cappella, no accompaniment. Essentially three quartets, 'cause they had three base baritones, first and second tenor, and a leader. Thirteen has a significance at Colgate, because it was always said traditionally it was founded by 13 men with 13 prayers and $13, that sort of mythical thing; the number 13 also had a lot of significance in Colgate, still does. This group was founded by just a bunch of guys during the war, 1942, they'd sing at the local Colgate Inn and they would start doing harmony. At that time, and just after Fred Waring and Robert Shaw and those people had very well-known choruses, so a lot of it was an imitation of that kind of singing. Mostly classic, show tunes, that sort of stuff. Actually for the first couple of years that I was there we started moving out from singing around the local area, Albany, Syracuse, Utica, Ithaca, mostly college kind of song fests; they began to start visiting high schools as a recruiting tool, we used to sing in a lot of high school assemblies and one of us, usually me as the leader, in my senior year would usually talk about Colgate and encourage high school kids to come and we'd usually go to high schools that were other college kids, Colgate kids had come from. And then we started going and getting into singing in nightclubs, singing on TV, which was just getting started, radio.
EB: Went out to Los Angeles, you said, what was your impression of that place?
TS: Well, that was in my junior year. So that would have been the spring of '53, my junior year and all I remember is we had a couple of concerts, we were singing in Palm Springs. My only memory of that was getting in these cars that had been rented for us and going through these miles and miles and miles of orange groves and fruit groves, which I guess are no longer there, Orange County is no longer there or whatever it was. I remember that, I don't remember much else.
EB: It'd probably be interesting coming from New York; you think oranges only come in a crate, you don't think of them hanging on a tree.
TS: I don't remember much more about that. I do remember they were making The Robe at the time, forgotten who played in that I think it was…
EB: Was that Kirk Douglas?
TS: No, I think it was Richard Burton. I think one of his first movies and I'm not sure of that. But anyway, I remember we went on that set; that was impressive to see these big Hollywood sets, we had never seen before. Then we sang at a couple of benefits, sang with Doris Day at a benefit; got a picture of myself with her.
EB: So you got to meet her?
TS: Yeah, and we sang on the Red Skelton Show, which was a TV show at the time and most of what we did was considered good PR for the university. These were healthy, well-mannered college kids, clean-cut, we wore tuxes or we wore a blazer and shirt and tie and we stood up and we sang. We were very good; we had won a number intercollegiate song festivals all over the northeast.
EB: I would like to get that, is that the tape there? I forgot it last time.
TS: That's the tape at our 50th reunion. But in there, we had made, when I was a junior I think, we made an RCA Victor recording and, I think, the group subsequently has made three or four.
EB: They were getting money out of that?
TS: A little bit, mostly to help support travel because most of the cost was travel.
EB: No individual…
TS: Oh no, we didn't get paid a thing. Occasionally, they'd launder your shirts, all your travel expenses were paid if you flew or you drove or took a train; but we did a lot of mooching too. The alumni, the alumni were very, very helpful and frequently we would go and six or seven alumni in a community who we would contact in advance would put us up in their homes and they'd feed us and all that.
EB: It was good training for what was to come.
TS: Right. So I sang in that group as a freshman for four years and was elected the leader, we elected our own leader; and it was his responsibility to manage and to conduct it and be the spokesperson so that was a very important experience for me.
EB: Is it still going at Colgate College?
TS: Oh gosh, yeah. It's twice its size but they admitted women at first in the mid-70's, I'm guessing, it's probably been 20 years. So, in the mid-70's women were admitted and now I think, I follow the alumni news, when I was there, there was something like 1,200 students, now there's closer to 2,000; it's probably, I'm not sure, probably 40% women now.
EB: What was Hamilton, New York like then, similar to New Rochelle?
TS: No, no. Hamilton was a little tiny college town, as a matter of fact, everything there survived on the college; the men's store, the book store, the theater would be packed with students on Friday and Saturday nights seeing movies.
EB: No industry?
TS: No, none that I'm aware of. Well, there was milk processing, there were a lot of farms around. When you go to Hamilton, coming south from Utica when you get off the train or coming over the, what is now the New York Thruway, it wasn't there at the time or coming up south from Binghamton on back roads. You went through miles and miles and miles of the central New York rolling hills, almost all farm, lot of dairy farms. And it was the first time I ever saw one of these big enormous tank cars speeding down these little tiny roads and screech to a halt and they'd pick up the milk, the farmer would throw how many cans of milk in and they'd go on to the next place and where they ended up, I have no idea. I think they did have a milk processing plant but basically the houses were practically all occupied by faculty and the College Inn was supported by, essentially, the university's visitors, alumni, and guests. The main street in town was Fraternity Road where there were, I don't know, 15 or 16 or 17 fraternities and other than the university there was nothing else there, everybody who was there had something or another to do with the university or was a service supported by the university out in the middle of beautiful rolling hills of central New York, but small, little town.
EB: You could almost describe early Reno that way. The college was big in the 20's and 30's, when this place was just a college town.
TS: No, as we talked about earlier, Clinton which is north of Hamilton on your way to Utica, is where Hamilton college is and people would always get those two confuse; Hamilton College in Clinton, New York and Colgate in Hamilton, New York.
EB: That's where Dr. Massoth…
TS: Very similar little college towns, but there were lots of others throughout that part; whereas, Ithaca where Cornell is, is a pretty big city and Syracuse, of course, a pretty big city.
EB: So, we're going to start into medical school now.
TS: Yeah. You were right, that piece of paper I gave you about my mother's wedding date, my older sister was wrong, I looked it up. My parents were married in April of '21 and my sister was born in April of '22, but we can correct that when we see that. Okay, I just wanted to put that on the record.
EB: Good. Thanks for checking it out, we'll check on that then. So it was '21.
TS: Yeah, that paper I gave you had the wrong date.
EB: What was Albany like when you got there? Capital of a large state.
TS: Yeah, capital of the state, but it was pretty old as I recall. Because, remember, the big development in Albany came later when Rockefeller was the governor. At the time I was there from '54-'58, it was a pretty old city; then it had been an Irish democratic political seat for years, the same couple of politicians ran it, as I understand it, for years and years and years, although I didn't know much about it. I'd only visited Albany once in my life and that was to be interviewed to go to medical school and when I went back there was a fairly old hospital, which has all been changed, well modern, but it was an old hospital and a fairly small medical school building attached to the back of the hospital. You'd walk through a hallway to get to the hospital. It was literally attached as though you'd attach something on the back of Washoe or St. Mary's; and then they had an old TB hospital across a parking lot that had been there and still had active TB patients at the time. Because remember Saranac Lake was north of Albany and Saranac Lake for years had been a refuge for sending people with tuberculosis to get out into the mountains and the cool air; then they had a little blood bank and a few other things. It was considered an average medical school; it was part of Union University so it had an academic base, but Union University was in Schenectady, 20 miles away.
EB: There was a medical school up there?
TS: No, Albany was the medical school for Union University.
EB: No? That was it.
TS: But it had always been connected to the hospital and it was one of the older medical schools in the country, founded back in the 1850's or '60s; and like many medical schools, we talked about earlier, was attached to a hospital. But it survived after the Flexner and got itself attached to Union University. Many other hospital-based medical schools and clinic-based medical schools and doctor office-based medical schools disappeared from the scene after the Flexner Report. I can look up the date before we edit this; I think it's 1915, whatever. So, Albany was one of those schools like Flower and Fifth Avenue in New York that survived the Flexner Report, made the change to an academic, university-based science and survived that; but it always had the tradition of being part the Albany Medical Center, if you will. Yes, we had a chancellor over in Schenectady, the dean did report to him but it was pretty much independent; a lot of symbiotic relationship between the hospital and the medical school.
EB: Who was the dean, do you remember?
TS: Yes, very well.
EB: Oh, this was the man you were telling me about.
TS: When I got there his name was Wiggers, Dean Wiggers and he was a Ph.D. which was unusual, most deans have been, and certainly more recently and for a long period of time were physicians, but Dean Wiggers was a Ph.D. physiologist. His father was a famous physiologist, well-known in the physiology world in Cleveland, I believe at Western Reserve. Western Reserve University, the senior Wiggers had been world famous cardiac physiologist; well, anyway, the son had just been appointed the dean at Albany when I got there. He was very good with students.
EB: Was not an M.D.?
TS: No, he wasn't. No, he was a Ph.D. in physiology and he was, I think, very forward thinking and brought in some very good faculty, but it was still considered a fairly small school; did not have anywhere near the research-base, either money, or faculty, or reputation that the schools in New York City had like Cornell or Columbia, or certainly nothing like the New England schools at Harvard and Boston and Yale and those places. But it had been for years a school that essentially produced a lot of family physicians; they're called GP's in those days for upstate New York and many of the alumni, it's changed, but in those days many of the alumni had settled all around Albany, Schenectady, Troy up to Saranac Lake, Lake Champlain, west toward Utica; lots of Albany graduates when into general practice. Of course, when I got to medical school in 1954, still a significant percentage of medical school graduates were going into general practice, one-year internship still, family practice as a specialty hadn't gotten started, that was 15 years later. The Board of Family Medicine got started in 1969, so this is '54, 15 years earlier. There were still GP's who got one year of internship maybe did some military service, the Korean War was now over and Vietnam hadn't even begun. So they would go into practice, several of my classmates went into practice after one-year internship.
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