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"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

                        Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)


     How do I compress eight years of my life, living in Belgium, into a few posts without straining the attention of my readers?  My goal is to share experiences that you might find of interest without making my writing into an exercise of egocentricity.  I will attempt my best efforts here and break it down a bit into a few postings.
     I have already written of my early days in Belgium but I want to share with you what a medical education was like and how it changed over the years I was there.

The Free University of Brussels (L'Universite' Libre de Bruxelles)

     The "Free" above, does not indicate the cost but, rather, the principle behind its founding.  Founded in 1834, the Faculty of Medicine, as part of the larger university, was based in secularism and free thought as a balance against the traditional Catholic universities that prevailed in Belgium at that time.  As Belgium is a bilingual country (French and Flemish or Dutch with a small part of the country German-speaking), the university reflected this and had two sections in each language until, in 1969, during my stay there, it actually split into two distinct linguistic universities with, today, two separate campuses.  The university is proud of numerous Nobel Prize winners on its faculty.
All this in one little country!

      For a nation the size of the state of Maryland, having separate cultures, languages, and sectional economies, that's quite a strain and, at times, it's been held together by a thread with much conflict and competition.   Nevertheless, it persists and remains the capital of the EU.  The country has contributed to science, the arts, and diplomacy far in a way far beyond its size.  Just to mention a few well-known Belgians: Audrey Hepburn, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Cesar Franck, the filmmaking Dardenne brothers, Jacques Brel, Toots Thielemans, Jacky Ickx, Eddy Merckx, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, Rene Magritte, and Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret among many others.  Let's not forget the huge cultural contributions of Belgium like Tin Tin as well as the Smurfs!

THE MEDICAL SCHOOL

     As in American medical schools, the first few years were dedicated to pre-clinical studies with clinical experience and an internship tacked on to the last half.  The first years were taken up with Anatomy, Biochemistry and Physiology among others.
     The anatomy lab was human dissection and groups of 4-6 students were assigned to a cadaver, mine being an elderly man with one of the first pacemakers in his chest wall.  One of my partners during the first few days, a young woman, in the middle of dissection, reached in her lab coat and took out a small spray bottle of perfume and, looking around to see if the preceptors were watching, spread a few spritzes over the body.  We looked on with curiosity at her as she said, "ca sent mauvais" ("it smells bad") which caused us all to break up in laughter.

Cadaver Lab..That's me third from the left!
 
We bonded over "Monsieur X" for that year, isolating every organ, muscle, nerve and blood vessel with care.  One day one of them asked me, "tu es yid?" (Are you a Jew?).  My first reaction was defensive, thinking back to a few unpleasant episodes in my youth, but, he quickly explained that everyone at our dissection table was the child of a Holocaust survivor.

Obviously, all courses were in French but every now and then, we would have a guest speaker from the English world, the most memorable being Sir John Eccles from Australia.  Having won the Nobel Prize in 1963, he gave an excellent lesson to us in Physiology class about the synapses of the brain, a lecture that has stuck with me ever since.  Our own Physiology professor was no slouch either, Paul Bordet, son of Nobel Prize winner Jules Bordet, discoverer of the cause of whooping cough.

EXAMS

     For me, the most frightening and anxiety-provoking aspect of this education was the exam period. There was only one exam in each subject at the end of the year and, if you failed any one of them, you had to return in September and re-take all of them, even if you aced some!  To make matters worse, they were all ORAL, in French, before either one or several professors.  Sometimes the questions were written on scraps of paper and turned upside down and you'd have to pick one...luck of the draw.  I must admit that, sometimes, if I wasn't sure of an answer, I'd explain that I had forgotten the French word for it.  That didn't last long as the professors were no fools and quickly saw through that!

     I think I wore the same suit, tie, and shoes throughout every exam I took, almost a ritual.  Later on, after Suzanne arrived, she would make me Cream of Wheat the morning of each exam, as it was the only thing I could hold down because of nerves.  Even with that, it didn't last long in my stomach.  I don't think I've eaten Cream of Wheat since leaving Belgium!  Fortunately, as time went by, some of the professors who were American-trained, gave multiple choice and essay exams, contributing in easing my dyspepsia!  I still have recurrent nightmares about those exams.
Cream of Wheat..."I don't feel so well!"

     A couple of years ago, we were vacationing in Costa Rica and we met a nice young couple on their honeymoon.  Over drinks, he, an American medical student, told me that, like myself, his dad had gone to ULB medical school around the same time and, while he was now a highly respected neonatologist, still suffered from recurrent nightmares about his exams!

HOME AGAIN
     I returned home that first summer deflated and depressed, but knowing Suzanne and our marriage awaited us.  I caught a cheap student charter home that I think was the longest flight I've ever taken, stopping in Shannon, Ireland and Gander, Newfoundland for re-fueling before landing at Montreal where Suzanne was waiting to pick me up.  In Shannon, I had stocked up on a bottle of Irish Mist that was diminished in volume by the time we got to Montreal.  She was going to summer school at St. Lawrence and had rented an old quonset hut in Vetsville on the campus where returning veterans lived after the war.  I arrived in Montreal carrying a little black valise in which was a human dis-articulated skeleton, so I could review the bones that summer.  I had previously used one of the skeletal hands in Brussels one night, out with friends at the Musee de Cinema, where Lon Chaney was starring in "Phantom of the Opera".  There was a romantic couple sitting in front of us, more interested in each other than the film.  As impulsive as I was, I casually stroked the fellow's arm, wrapped over his date's shoulder, with "the hand"...achieving the desired effect as you would expect!  He and his date reacted with good will and laughter.  Hopefully, I have matured since then, although my kids might differ on that!
"Excuse me, what time is this movie over?"

 Anyway, imagine the custom's officer's face when I opened the valise as requested!  After a long explanation, I ran out to Suzanne who was waiting for me and was so happy to see her!  We hopped into our "new" used car, a Studebaker Lark convertible, yellow, with a V8 engine and a Blaupunkt radio!  We headed off to Canton and our life together...at least for a few months.

We had a few weeks alone before our wedding on July 15th, 1967.








Comments

  1. 1) I must confess I still have horrible nightmares about oral exams ! ;-)
    2) I love the Studebaker !

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Studebaker looks a lot better than my FIAT 124 Sport Spider. Foul play!

    ReplyDelete

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