Medical School
OUR LAST MILITARY CLASS due to enroll at the opening of the Winter term will consist of a Navy delegation and two civilians. The School year will end in June and unless all prophecy fails, our deceleration will be sudden and complete at that point with all members of the Army and Navy graduating or going on inactive duty status.
Our residence requirement has been discontinued and only the first floor of North Fayerweather Hall is now a military zone. The upper floors have been opened for general student residence although priority is still being given to medical and premedical students.
Alpha of Alpha Kappa Kappa is to be the first fraternity to emerge from the chrysalis of the war and will house clinical clerks in their fifth term and second year students who feel that such residence is the farthest possible removal from the decks of a Navy barracks.
Greater divergence in medical school calendars is developing with each term and will continue to provide incongruities for students even after school deceleration is complete. For instance, Douglas Wayne Frerichs, who completed his fourth term here on October 25, began his third year at San Francisco on the 29th, while one of his classmates, Thomas Kelvin Burnap, will not continue formal classes at Los Angeles until next September.
Our transfer distribution which in general will not take place until the Spring will be the widest geographically and the most diverse in number of schools of recent years and will be reported next month along with enrollment data. It is not possible at present to predict where the succeeding classes will fit into the subsequent picture.
It is too early to attempt an analysis of the academic changes of the war here or elsewhere. The probabilities are, however, that certain modifications of curriculum and calendar will be retained and that others which had been welcomed as the millenium will be relegated to limbo, not necessarily because they were actually bad but because they were tried under such unfavorable auspices. The absorption of the long summer vacation into the calendar, which under suitable circumstances would have much in its favor and was occurring gradually especially from the second year onward, received a resounding setback not so much because it was regimentation and therefore evil but rather because all other real vacations were eliminated at the same time. On the other hand the placing of the recesses, meager though they were, between terms was a decided improvement over the long interruption just before final examinations which has characterized so many calendars in the past. Whether this is a sacred cow which must be led back into the old pasture remains to be seen. It is certain that most school calendars are not the result of logical planning directed solely toward the best program for teaching purposes. During the transition sound improvements may be possible, however, and it is hoped that a complete report on your proposals may be ready next month.
Our Hitchcock Hospital staff meetings are gradually talcing on the character of seminars with formal papers and preliminary reports of original research as well as reports of cases and statistical analyses. The most recent example of such research report which I would consider of definitive significance is "The Use of Sodium Succinate as an Analeptic Agent in Barbiturate Narcosis" by Richard H. Barrett, Anaesthesiologist of the Hospital staff and Instructor in Pharmacology, given on October 11.
During the recent courses at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, John A. Murtagh, Instructor in Otolaryngology, represented the School and Hospital on the subject of "Laryngeal Paralysis."
The Montpelier Mental Hygiene Group was addressed on October 8 by John B. McKenna, Consultant in Psychiatry to Dartmouth College and our Instructor in Physical Diagnosis and Clinical Neurology. 1934 Major Jackson Wright, overseas twentytwo months with the 94th General Hospital, writes from France that in his travels around the ETO he ran into few Dartmouths but did see several times Bob Clymer who had been on all kinds of duty including one of the SS murder camps; Artie Ecker at his neuro-surgical center in England; and had a Hanoverian on the Staff, Pauline Murphy, quondam Hitchcock operating room supervisor. He hopes to be home before Christmas and to come back here with Madge for a second honeymoon.
1938 Mrs. Charles Edmund Stade announces the marriage of her sister Helen Keith to Seymour Fiske Ochsner at Lake Kushaqua, New York, on September eighth. 1939 Capt. Austin R. Grant, who went over with the 100th, a semi-mobile evacuation hospital, to Swansea and Fleetwood, hit the beach at Utah and set up his tent at St. Saveur, Sensde Bretagne, Brest, Esch, Tongeren near Liege, Poulderbush near Antwerp in support of the 104th Division, and then was detached on a surgical team with the 67th Evacuation Hospital for emergency duty at Malmedy and Spa. Then he hurried around the Bulge to the 107th at St. Hubert and ended up in a warehouse at Sedan until Christmas. He rejoined his outfit at Tongeren; went to Terwinselen, Holland to support the Roer crossing; to Suchteln for the Rhine west bank; to Rhineberg for the crossing; then to Weidenbruck in middle Germany; then up with the armoured to Magdeburg on the Elbe. He has great respect for the word "semi-" especially when immediately preceding "mobile." He is on his way to Camp Crowder and thinking about a quiet spot for a good surgical residency.
Lt. Comdr. Eric Davidson MC USNR is on duty now at Brooklyn Naval Hospital and may give us a report later.
Capt. John Godfrey is reported back but his status and plans are not known here. 1942 Lt. Kenneth E. Gross MC who went through Okinawa Shima as a battalion surgeon with the 502 AAA Gun B'n is still there expecting to go to Korea for the winter. He is seeing things that once were to him only pictures in Belding, such as Shistosoma japonicum; is doing a good bit of work in the civilian area and having chances to visit the diagnostic laboratory set up by the AMG about a mile away. His outfit is being broken up to go home or for replacements in future occupation forces.
Lt. William L. Jamison MC USNR went from Lejeune to Gulfport, boarded an LST with half of the 73d Replacement Draft of 16 doctors and 200 corpsmen; saw Eddie Chamberlin whose DE was tied up alongside at Colon; stopped at Pearl Harbor and then the Mariannas, ending up on Saipan with Hdq. Cos., Ist Batt. Bth Reg. of the Second Marine Division. He has seen Maj. N. T. Milliken; Bob Mussey, an Orthopedic Consultant; Frank Cline who is his Regimental Surgeon; and Joe Crehan with the Medical Battalion. He says that Nips are still being found, with thirty including two women found in a cave in September just a half mile from his station. His wife is living with her parents at Falling Waters, West Virginia.
Ist Lt. John R. Reed MC AUS went from Carlisle to the Station Hospital at Camp Roberts, Cal. Having had eighteen months in surgery at Lakeside after Western Reserve he landed good duty on the surgical service and was busy. Marjorie went out with him and was learning to live at 100° F. in the shade, at least that was true in August.
1943 Lt. Richard B. Magee MC AUS was married to Anna Louise Shimer, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Harry A. Shimer, at Bedford, Pennsylvania, on November first.
Warren Justin Taylor was married to Marjorie Marian, daughter of Colonel and Mrs. Carroll Ray Hutchins, in Hanover on September fifteenth.
