"Snowed"
This year at Carnival the Dartmouth Medical School students proved that truth is beauty. Their medical fraternity, AKK, built a snow statue showing a student buried under a pile of books reaching imploringly toward the little cask hung from the neck of man's best friend. The statue's title was "Snowed" which, the evidence seems to indicate, is true enough and the judges of Carnival statues awarded it first prize for beauty. A synthesis of a sort was achieved.
John M. Wortley '53 of St. Joseph, Mo., a second-year medic, was out there packing slush all the frigid way. Unlike many statues on campus, "Snowed" was finished on schedule; a typical result of the planning of time and study habits that medical students have to learn.
Most students (and professors) would agree with John Wortley that the first year of medical school at Dartmouth is "rough." Bacteriology, Neuroanatomy, Biochemistry, Physiology and Anatomy are some of the courses that start men out with a bewildering mass of information which they spend the rest of their school years assimilating.
Like almost everyone at the "Ack Shack," John has disappeared from the active campus scene into his studies. Classes start at 8:00 a.m., the lunch break is often used for study or reviewing notes, and classes go on until about 4:30 in the afternoon. In the evening there is more study that usually drowses out between midnight and 2:00 a.m. The work is so concentrated and the pace so brisk that to fall behind is virtually to throw in the towel.
Every once in a while some particularly ingenious young man will devise a plan that, while strictly in the line of duty, changes the pace. John and a group picked as a second-year project the testing of the water at Outing Club cabins. It was a commendable idea but unfortunately the students had to spend a lot of time hiking on DOC trails. They came up with a 100-page report.
Now, just halfway through his second year at Medical School, John feels that he is finally getting down to work on the real stuff of his education - meeting with live patients. He gives physical examinations, visits patients in the wards, and makes tentative diagnoses while carrying such courses as Clinical Pathology, Physical Diagnosis, Surgery and Obstetrics.
As part of the Obstetrics course, students are expected to be present at a number of deliveries. A few weeks ago, John studied late and was just about to turn in when he got a hurry call from the hospital - delivery expected any minute. He took a book under his arm, jumped into a car and just made it. The time he heard that twins were due in about 15 minutes he and several others raced up to the hospital only to find the twins crying happily in the nursery. On another occasion the stork ran into bad flying weather and John got the book open and a lot of work done while waiting three hours.
Next fall, John will transfer to the University of Kansas Medical School for two years and then he plans to be in the service for three years. After the service he can look forward to one or two years as an intern. Unlike many of his friends John will probably find it an easy matter to get located in an internship because the girl he will marry next August, Barbara Nightingale, is studying to be a laboratory technician and the scarcity of such trained people will enable the Wortley family to offer "a package deal." ("They will want her more than they want me.") If John wishes to go into a specialty, perhaps Surgery or Internal Medicine, there will be a residency for three years and then at about 35 he will be ready for a staff position.
John is used to hard work the year around. While an undergraduate, he received financial aid from the College and worked for the Dartmouth Dining Association. Summers were spent making money for his education. He worked as a pot washer on Cape Cod, as a swimming instructor in California, as an advertising man sticking up "Wonder Bread" signs in store windows, and last summer as a workman in a wire rope factory.
John Wortley will make a fine doctor. You can sense the dedication to his profession and, without much imagination, the authority with which he will discuss medical problems with his patients.
He has always pointed toward medicine, never thought of another career. Now like the "Snowed" student in the statue he has time to think of little else but his books and that date in August.
JOHN WORTLEY '53
