Healing Outside the Hospital

In the January snow outside a remote Delaware Water Gap lodge in eastern Pennsylvania, CynthiaKelmenson '95 sat shivering as four medical students argued about how to fix her broken leg. She couldn't move, they were far from a hospital, and the cold made time short. What should the students do for her? Or rather, what should they do if the scenario were real?

The visit to the lodge and ensuing accident were part of the syllabus for "Wilderness Medicine," a clinical course fourth-year medical student Kelmenson and several other students helped design at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. The class whisked 18 students away from the support and supplies of a hospital to make them re-think emergency medicine.

"Wilderness doesn't simply mean 'in the woods.' It encompasses any medical care given more than an hour away from a hospital, including rural areas, Third-World countries and even airplanes," says Kelmenson, who also took the class. "It's about dealing with common medical issues without common medical devices and medication. We had to apply the medical knowledge we learned in the hospital to the setting outside. The answers aren't always the same."

Kelmenson and her colleagues gave a poster presentation on their course at a recent conference of the Association of American Medical Colleges. If the course catches on, another Kelmenson may soon benefit from the lesson: sister Sarah'99 is now a first-year medical student at UPenn.

Kelmenson, right, splints the leg ofa "patient" during a wildernessmedicine class she helped design.