The Beginning of the End

“Medicine is not for me.” This was the agonising  certainty, shared during the first few weeks of our life in  that hallowed institution by many of my three hundred odd fellow students of the largest batch ever to enter the  Medical College. It is only with hindsight that we can  confirm the validity of the conviction that the five-odd  years we spent there, beginning October of 1960, were  some of the most enjoyable years of our lives. 

The Overwhelming Tide of Knowledge 

One of the main reasons for the despondent view  mentioned at the outset was the burden of the sheer  abundance of information that we were expected to  retain. We had exceeded the combined technical  vocabulary of all four university entrance subjects within  just one week. Some jaw-breaking names we found  laughable; and such ridiculous hyphenated terms as antero-superior, ventero-lateral, and fellow-of-the opposite-side, the fancy term for the corresponding  analogous organ, were, to put it mildly, most confusing.  Also, how silly and unreasonable we thought that a tiny  slip of a muscle beside the nose, which at best could do  little more than lift a bit of the upper lip, had to be given  the long, high-sounding and bombastic name, levator  palpebrae superioris alaeque nasi!

More than Chew and Digest 

In his formal essay, Of Studies, the English essayist Sir  Francis Bacon classified books into three categories,  saying: “Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed,  some few to be chewed and digested.” The ‘chappie,’ as  Professor Milroy Paul would have called him, would  have extended these dietary analogies to our prescribed  textbooks. In the unlikely event he had been a student in  our batch, he would have then, like us, classified all  these books as being of just one type: to be ‘chewed and 

digested,’ and, no doubt, he would have added,  ‘completely absorbed’ and ‘never excreted.’ 

The Three Pillars of the Block 

The three subjects in the ‘Block,’ the nom de guerre for  the first two years of Medical College, and also referred  to as the 2nd MB, were Physiology, Biochemistry, and  Anatomy. 

Cock Lectures 

Prof. A.C.E. Koch was our Professor of Physiology. An  amiable man, large-bodied with an equally large heart,  he was as genial as he was erudite. Impeccably dressed  

in a white tussore suit, he would change to a crisp white  overcoat once in his office. His lectures were referred to  jovially as “Cock Lectures,” purely for its phonetic  connotation.

In his first few lectures, during which he tried his best to  make us familiar with the milieu intérieur, he repeatedly  mentioned one of the principal exponents of that topic,  the French physiologist Claude Bernard. The chaps who  were ultra keen on Physiology, the likes of Derek Frewin,  Suji Ratnatunge, Asoka Dissanayake and their ilk, even  referred to the man by his first name. Others, with scant  respect even for great men of science, started calling  Bernard de Silva, one of our batchmates, Claude, much  to his annoyance. 

However, even this warm and cheerful person didn’t  help our situation. Almost certainly deliberately, with  tongue in cheek, he added to our perplexity from the  

start. Introducing the chemical ‘adrenaline,’ which we  had swiftly copied into our notes, he soon followed with,  “nor adrenaline.” Interpreting this as “no” adrenaline,  we would promptly cut the word off, only to reinstate it  when he next said “adrenaline.” It was only much later  that we learned that noradrenaline was a closely related  chemical in its own right. 

With my inner voice vehemently protesting, I really  cannot say why I decided to persist in studying medicine 

as a career. I’m certain, however, that none of the several  others who felt like I did ever regretted that we endured. 

Small Stature, Big Molecules 

Biochemistry was no less mind-boggling. For a start, we  were informed that one Professor Hoover, Professor of  Biochemistry, would address us. Ridiculous, perhaps  with hindsight, but from the name, we had conjured up  the entrance of a well-set English or American expat in  horn-rimmed spectacles, possibly bald, with a  moustache or goatee and a grumpy face, stomping onto  the lecture podium. But what came in was a diminutive,  brown-skinned, bespectacled and benign-countenanced  individual, covered from neck to almost mid-tibial level  in a fully buttoned white overcoat. When he literally  floated in, many thought we were seeing a miniaturised  and sun-tanned avatar of the product we had originally  imagined. 

Biochemistry has long been regarded worldwide as the  bedrock of modern medicine. At the time we entered 

Medical College, however, we found this hard to accept.  A child forced by its mother to gobble up bowls of  spinach soup is hardly in a mood to appreciate its  nutritional value, especially when faced with another  bowl of the unapetising stuff. 

The chemical formulae of substances like alpha tocopherol, bristling with numerous double bonds and  hydroxyl radicals that we were forced to remember,  didn’t encourage the vast majority of us to acknowledge  the biological importance of vitamin E, whose  biochemical name it supposedly was. Much later in the  course, one of the more skeptical among us asked the  affable Prof. Hoover why it was necessary to remember  such maddening formulae. His deadpan response: “A  misplaced double bond here or a missing hydroxyl radical there, and the whole compound could turn into  something entirely different and of no use to man or  beast!” 

Also associated with the teaching staff of the  Department of Biochemistry was Dr. Baptist, who  hardly, some said never, smiled. He too was fond of  torturing us with convoluted formulae teeming with 

impossible numbers of benzopyrene rings linked by a  maze of double bonds and hydroxyl radicals. He taught  us, with deep devotion, about compounds like glucose,  sucrose, fructose, and galactose. He was, quite fittingly,  nicknamed “Baptose.” 

The Anatomy Odyssey 

Our first visit to the anatomy dissecting room was, for all  but the more gory among us, a scene evoking a mixture  of emotions: fright, horror, and trepidation, combined, I  admit, with excitement and adventure. The sudden  appearance of a tall, white-haired figure in a long white  overcoat puffing himself from a bottle gave us quite a  shock. We thought he was some life-sized mechanical  model of a human being, powered on compressed air.  Only much later did we learn that it was Professor Waas,  Head of the Department of Anatomy, using a precursor  of the modern inhaler to relieve his asthma. 

It’s funny how we humans adapt to the conditions we  face. In no time, we were neither fazed by the 

decapitated bodies and half-dissected limbs, nor  bothered by the ever-present stench of formalin and the  dark-brown, viscous “body-fluid,” poured liberally over  tissues to keep them supple. The girls too, whether from  liberated backgrounds or more sheltered homes, were  getting on with the dissection of human corpses,  seemingly untroubled by the grim surroundings. 

Lecture Hall Fiasco 

The seats in the Physiology Lecture Theatre were  numbered, and we had to sit in our assigned places. A  few minutes before each lecture, a clerk from the ‘phys’  department, usually ‘Prick’ Perera (more about him  later) would note the empty seats and mark those  students as absent. But we were experts in seated lateral  movement. If a seat was unoccupied, the rest of us  would shift en masse along the row, like a string of  Streptococci on the move, to confuse the clerk and throw  him off the trail. This ploy almost always worked.

A latecomer had to find a seat quickly, from one end of a  row or the other. There wasn’t much time to dawdle. But  more often than not, the passage would be deliberately  blocked, forcing the poor soul to go down the steps and  try again from the opposite end, only to face the same  obstruction. This little drama usually brought the lecture  to a temporary halt, while the rest of us seized the  opportunity to stamp loudly on the wooden floorboards  and raise a cheerful din. 

When, after much earnest pleading, access was finally  granted, the trek to one’s designated seat was no less  traumatic. Walking sideways in a slightly hunched  posture along a narrow space lined with impatient knees  was awkward enough. But things got worse. If you were  male, your genitals risked ambush from under the seat  of the pants. If female, your buttocks and natal clefts  might be brushed by pencils, ballpoint pens, or even  articulated hand-bones. You might ask why the  vulnerable areas weren’t shielded by a hand. The answer  lies in the cruel arithmetic of burden: with both hands  fully occupied carrying books, bones, and dissecting 

equipment, the poor genitals and buttocks had little  choice but to fend for themselves. 

The end of a lecture brought its own kind of boisterous  entertainment. Ever watched an army regiment march  off the parade ground after their drill? Their precision  exit is quite something to behold. Now had a sergeant  major watched our hundred-and-fifty-odd batchmates  scramble out of the Phys Lecture Hall through just two  narrow doors, he’d have done somersaults in full regalia. 

A hasty getaway was essential if one hoped to make it to  the canteen for a quick tea-punt before the next  compulsory lecture, always at a distant location, with  barely enough time to arrive. 

If you’ve ever watched the Discovery Channel, you may  have seen an episode on the wildebeest migration across  the Serengeti in East Africa. As they surge en masse  from the open savannah into narrower passageways  toward greener pastures, they jostle and shove in an  instinctive frenzy. No need to travel to Africa, the exit  scene of students from the Phys Lecture Hall was a  worthy substitute. As we squeezed and buffeted past 

each other through the narrow doorways, one couldn’t  help but marvel at how red blood corpuscles must feel  navigating the microcapillaries. 

Once we had elbowed our way past the eager throng still  waiting to get in, we braced for the next ordeal in our  uphill march toward that elusive grail: the MB.BS.  (Ceylon). 

Mischief and Milestones 

But there were plenty more hurdles to clear and dead  ends to stumble through. What had seemed a gentle  curve in the road turned out to be a bewildering detour, as if the smooth Loops of Henle had morphed into a  labyrinth of Distal Convoluted Tubules. Still, for all its  rigours, the five-year course served up more than its fair  share of fun and mischief along the way to our distant  dream.