Laura’s grades were high. Her recommendations were genuinely enthusiastic, so she knew she would make it at least as far as the interview. But in her case there would not be the usual two appraisals – standard for male applicants – but three. Here again she capitulated to the inequity.
Her first encounter was with James L. Shay, M.D., a noted internist, in his Beacon Hill office dominated by a large window overlooking the sailboats on the Charles.
‘You’re a very pretty girl, Miss Castellano,’ he remarked, peering at her over his half-moon glasses.
‘Thank you,’ she replied. (What else could she say – You’re not bad yourself, Doctor?)
‘A girl like you should be getting married and having a bunch of nice kids, don’t you think?’
‘With due respect, sir, I don’t think medicine and motherhood are mutually exclusive.’
‘But they are, my dear. Believe me, they are. It’s impossible for a woman to pursue a full-time and really fruitful medical career without doing irreparable harm to her children. Now, you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?’
Laura was still unsure as to whether he was serious or just testing her.
‘I take your point, sir—’
‘Good, good—’
‘So I’ll never get married and just devote my life to medicine.’
Dr Shay peered over his glasses. ‘Surely you can’t be serious, Miss Castellano?’
This was the crunch. But after only a millisecond she responded, ‘I thought it was you who wasn’t being serious, Dr Shay.’
The interviewer had no riposte. He sat for a moment, fumbling with some papers, then rose with a tiny smile and said, ‘Thank you for coming by, Miss Castellano.’
She left his office knowing she had won the round, but fearing she had lost the vote.
In a small cubicle in a lab at ‘643’ (as the insiders referred to Building D at 643 Huntington Avenue), Louise Hoffman, Ph.D., a biochemist in her mid-thirties, proved almost more anxious to assert than to inquire.
‘I’ll be perfectly honest, Laura,’ she began. ‘I went through college wanting to be a doctor, too – and I was accepted by HMS, so this isn’t sour grapes. But the life of a woman doctor on the hospital floors is a daily humiliation. Some of the men simply refuse to acknowledge your right to be there. Look, you’ve got a good brain. Why not become a research scientist, where at least you won’t be treated as something only slightly better than a mop?’
‘But I want to change that – or at least try,’ Laura protested. ‘If we all shied away from clinical medicine because it’s a rough ride, we’ll be mops forever.’
Dr Hoffman smiled. ‘You’ve got a lot of spunk, Laura. I think you’ll make a wonderful doctor. That’s only’ – she paused dramatically – ‘if you survive Medical School.’
Two down and one to go. Laura knew the final session – the psychological evaluation – would be decisive.
Dr Paul Gardner saw his patients in a tasteful, red-brick annex to his home in Chestnut Hill. Laura arrived promptly at six-forty and ten minutes later the doctor beckoned her into his office. When she caught sight of the couch she thought for a split second that she might be asked to lie on it. But Dr Gardner motioned her toward a chair. In an instant, he was back at his desk, notepad open.
‘So?’
‘I beg your pardon, Doctor?’
‘So you want to be a doctor, Miss Castellano.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Any special reason?’
At least this guy was making some sense. ‘Well, to begin with, my father’s a doctor …’
‘Ah, and so you feel a rivalry with your father?’
‘No, not at all. I like him. I admire him.’
‘So then perhaps you are going through this medical business to, so to speak, woo him?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your mother is, I assume not a doctor. So therefore, by becoming a physician you would displace her as the preeminent woman in the family?’
‘Oh, please,’ Laura protested with exasperation, ‘this is such a load of – nonsense.’
‘You can say “crap”, Laura, you’re free to say anything you wish in here.’
‘Am I really?’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘Well then, Doctor, quite frankly, I think this whole line of questioning is total crap.’
Gardner actually seemed pleased at this. ‘Go on, go on.’
Laura no longer felt obliged to observe any decorum.
‘Look, Doctor, if you’d taken the trouble to read my essay you would have seen that my little sister died of polio when I was nine. So if you’re groping into my subconscious for some deep motives, how about survivor’s guilt? How about the idea that the only way I can justify my existence is by trying to make sure that other children don’t lose their sisters and brothers?’ Then she lowered her voice and without apologizing asked, ‘Now how does that grab you?’
Gardner looked her straight in the eye (for the first time during the session) and answered, ‘I think that’s most perceptive, Miss Castellano. I do hope you’ll consider psychiatry as a specialty.’
It had been an amazing year. For in 1957 the Russians had launched Sputnik into space. And to Luis Castellano’s delight, Castro and Ché Guevara (a heroic MD) had begun to launch their revolution from their stronghold in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra Mountains.
It was also the year the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn for the greener turf of Los Angeles. (O Perfidy! The very bleachers seemed to weep.)
And on April fifteenth, telegrams of acceptance to Harvard Medical School were delivered to adjacent houses on Lincoln Place, Brooklyn.
It was childhood’s end.
2
BECOMING DOCTORS
‘All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.” They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.’
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809–94) Professor of Anatomy and Dean of Harvard Medical School
8
Emerson once remarked that Socrates would have liked the atmosphere at Harvard College. A tranquil paradise of Georgian red-brick mansions, graced by wise and ancient trees, the Yard would have been the perfect place to hold a peripatetic seminar.
By the same token, Harvard Medical School would have suited Hippocrates, the totemic father of all doctors (and perhaps even Socrates’ own GP). The architecture of HMS is emphatically classical, its verdant quadrangle bounded on the east and west by marble buildings and dominated at the south by a stately temple buttressed with bold Ionic columns. A worthy monument to Apollo the Healer; Asclepius, god of medicine; and his daughter Hygieia, the divinity of Health.
Indeed, a frivolous legend has it that Hippocrates, having grown restless after spending two millennia in the Elysian Fields with the hale and hearty, came back to earth and applied to Harvard Med to observe what progress had been made in the profession since his heyday.
Posing as a straight-A Harvard senior who had scored a perfect eight hundred on the Med Aps and had also run four minutes for the mile, he went serenely confident to his interview. When asked by his interrogator, respected orthopedic surgeon Christopher Dowling, what he considered to be the essential principle of Medicine, Hippocrates confidently quoted himself, ‘First, do no harm.’
He was rejected as unsuitable.
There is considerable debate on what he should have said. One school of thought holds that the first principle of latter-day medicine is to find out if your patient has Blue Cross or Blue Shield. But this is cynical as well as incorrect. The true essence of modern medical philosophy, ignored only by a few altruistic renegades, is the doctor must never admit that he is wrong.
But how do these erstwhile mortals acquire their infallibility?
There is a hierarchy. First they are novitiates whose faith is sorely tested by autos-da-fé. They have to burn (in midnight oil) four long years. Thereafter, if not consumed, they enter a monastic order infamous for its asc
eticism – the ‘Somnambulists’ (in other words, interns). After a year of sleepless penance, they can in turn become flagellators for the younger postulants. And in time, they are initiated. Now there is no limit to their advancement in the Holy Order. Bishop, cardinal – even the Vatican.
Except in medicine there are ten thousand Romes: the pediatric papacy, the neurological, the psychiatric (whence the term ‘spiritual father’). There even is a Sacred Seat for the proctologist. Saint Peter built a church upon a rock. For many doctors, gallstones have sufficed.
But it all commences in ritual humiliation. And be it Buffalo or Boston, Mississippi or Montana, their rites are similar. Those who aspire to face the agony and suffering of humankind must first themselves become acquainted with it.
Harvard Med School’s single dormitory was a colossal architectural chimera – combining the worst of Venice and of Boston Gothic. (A few medical minds had referred to it as a ‘cacoplastic anomaly.’)
The circular lobby was topped by a garish rococo cranium, decorated by what can only be described as a med student’s nightmare: writhing snakes, beakers, flasks, and other laboratory vessels – offering a field day for Freudians. Over the door were the famous words of Dr Louis Pasteur, ‘Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés’ – In the field of scientific observation, chance favors only the mind that is prepared.
A long oak table was manned by several student clerks seated behind rectangular signs bearing letters of the alphabet so that the newcomers could more easily sign in and get their keys. The hum of quiet chatter reverberating in the dome mixed with the nearby strains of a Chopin waltz.
‘Ah, the C-sharp minor,’ Palmer sighed appreciatively, ‘and it must be Rubinstein.’
‘No,’ said a thin, bespectacled young man in a white coat. ‘It’s Applebaum.’
Laura spied a familiar group of Harvard refugees from across the river and hurried to join them, Palmer in pursuit.
Barney took his place in line, feeling lost. He was only mildly relieved to discover that they were indeed expecting him – and had even assigned him lodgings.
Actually, ‘lodgings’ was too grandiose a term. His room turned out to be a closet decorated in a style that reminded him of the inside of a cheese box. Surely the inmates of Death Row had more cheerful quarters, he thought to himself – and softer beds. But what can you expect for three hundred bucks a year?
Fearing suffocation, he kept the door open while he unpacked. As he was piling up his Jockey shorts, a smiling face with large exophthalmic brown eyes peeked in.
‘You first-year?’ he asked, as the rest of him appeared.
Barney nodded and offered his hand. ‘Barney Livingston, Columbia.’
‘Maury Eastman, Oberlin. I’m a writer.’ He took an intellectual puff on the pipe he had been holding in his left hand.
‘Then what are you doing in Vanderbilt Hall?’ Barney asked bemusedly.
‘Oh, I’m going to be a doctor too – but in the sense that Keats, Rabelais, Chekhov, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were doctors.’
‘I thought Keats didn’t graduate,’ Barney remarked.
‘He still worked as assistant surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital.’ Maury’s eyes gleamed. ‘Do you want to write too?’
‘Only prescriptions,’ Barney replied. ‘Have you published?’
‘Oh, a few short stories in the little magazines – I can slide them under your door. But it’s all a kind of rev-up for the first Big One. A few New York houses have already shown interest. If you turn out to be colorful, I’ll work you in.’
‘What exactly is the Big One gonna be?’
‘The diary of a Harvard Med student. You know, the pain, the angst – what it’s really like to be on the cutting edge. Millions of readers are fascinated by the mystique of medicine—’
‘Want to know another interesting fact, Maury? The word “fascinating” comes from the Latin meaning “prick”.’
‘Come on—’
‘Really – my father was a Latin teacher. It comes from fascinum-i, neuter noun signifying an icon of the male member. You should try and work that in somehow.’
‘I must say, Barney, you’re an oasis of urbanity in a sewer of scientific snobs.’
‘Thanks. Uh – see you down at the faculty sherry party, huh?’
‘Absolutely. I’m especially anxious to see how the girls interact. I mean the admissions people must have taken Spanish fly this year. Usually they pick dogs or pigs. But this time there’s an absolute stunner. I get priapic just thinking about her …’
Oh, shit, Barney said to himself, here we go again. ‘Yeah – name’s Laura Castellano, I think.’
‘Who?’ asked Maury.
What? thought Barney.
‘I’m talking about Grete Andersen. She was Miss Oregon a few years ago – and let me tell you, she is built like a brick shithouse.’
‘Hey, I’m glad you warned me. I’d better shower and shave so I can … fascinate old Grete.’
‘I’ll be watching every move you make.’
‘You do that, Maury. Then you’ll believe my theory that the Kama Sutra was actually written in Brooklyn.’
When the author finally departed, Barney came to a significant decision: From now on he would keep his door closed.
Having made the revolutionary decision a decade earlier to admit women as potential physicians, Harvard had now taken another bold step by consecrating a small section of what had heretofore been a monastery to shelter its handful of female students. Their area of Vanderbilt Hall, officially known as the Deanery, was colloquially referred to by the hairy-chested XY-chromosomal population as ‘The Erogenous Zone.’
It was here that Laura Castellano was required to spend her freshman year.
She was scrubbing off the grime of the journey when a radiant face appeared in the long mirror of the ladies’ bathroom.
‘Going to the party?’ a velvety voice inquired.
Laura nodded. ‘Just for a few seconds, I’ve got a date. Besides, for some reason sherry doesn’t agree with me.’
‘It’s the congeners,’ her companion replied, ‘they really mess up your metabolism – toxic as hell. From a purely scientific standpoint, they really should serve vodka or scotch.’
‘Fat chance. Around here, chemistry yields to economy.’
The girl smiled, revealing a set of incandescent teeth.
‘I’m Grete Andersen,’ she said. ‘And I’m the scaredest person in the first-year class.’
‘Wrong – you’re talking to the scaredest. My name’s Laura Castellano.’
‘How could you be frightened?’ Grete asked. ‘You’ve already got the cutest boy in our class.’
‘Thanks. Palmer’s terrific, I agree. But he’s not a student.’
‘Then why was he lining up to get a room?’
‘Oh, you must be talking about Barney – tallish, black curly hair?’
Grete nodded. ‘And extremely cute. I really dig the catlike way he keeps shifting from one sneaker to the other – like a boxer or something. You mean he’s not yours?’
‘Not romantically. We grew up together in Brooklyn – sort of like brother and sister. If you’re a good girl, Grete, I’ll introduce you.’
‘If I were a good girl I’d never have made it here,’ she replied in a suggestive purr.
Laura smiled and thought, Barney, you’re gonna really owe me for this one.
Never again in the next four years would they see so many distinguished physicians gathered in a single Harvard room. The very air was charged with eminence. Since it was clear that the incoming students had little more to offer than hushed reverence, the faculty spoke to one another in a semipublic manner, as their acolytes hung on every syllable.
The topic was perennial: Who would win it this year? And they weren’t talking about the World Series. Indeed, rumor had it that at least half a dozen professors had bags packed in readiness should they suddenly be commanded
to appear in Stockholm.
Indeed, HMS, ever on the lookout for Nobel material, had given ample thought to its future laurels when selecting the class it was now welcoming with Pedro Domecq sherry. Due consideration had of course been given to the ‘whole man’ (and in the case of Grete and Laura, the whole woman). But Harvard had also ferreted out a substantial number of brilliant and truly dedicated minds – men with no other interest in life but research, whose libidos much preferred the viral to the virile.
One such specimen was Peter Wyman, a certified genius who already had a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and was adding an M.D. to his name only to be sure of having a passport into every area of the research world.
Peter of the oatmeal face and scraggly hair was the only one genuinely talking to a professor, speaking earnestly with a cytobiologist of ‘going beyond the subcellular.’
‘God,’ whispered an awed classmate standing next to Barney, ‘he makes me want to pack up and go home.’
‘He makes me want to barf,’ Barney retorted.
With that, he moved off. For he had spied Laura entering the door – with Grete Andersen.
Instinct told him that he had to intercept the ball before it got any further upcourt.
When Laura began to introduce them he felt like he was going into cardiac arrest. Never in his life had he seen a body like that – not in Midwood, Sunset Boulevard – or even on the burlesque stage in Union City, New Jersey. This is a med student?
He heard the approaching hoofbeats of the rest of the Hippocratic horde. He made the sharpest possible move, asking her to have ‘pizza or something’ right after the reception was over.
The candlepower in the room seemed infinitely brighter as Grete smiled. ‘That’s super – I adore pizza.’ She would need a few seconds after the party to step into something more casual and would meet him downstairs at seven-thirty. (Great going, Livingston – slam dunk!)
The rest of the party was an exhilarating toboggan ride. Barney chatted briefly and amicably with a few professors, thanked his interviewer – who made an emphatic pitch for orthopedic surgery (‘that’s real man’s medicine’) and started for the door.