CHAPTER IV
MY PRE-CLINICAL DAYS
(1973-75)
The Brit ish
Model of init iation in Medicine is
the worst that I can think of. The dream
of being a doctor is marred on seeing a dead body to dissect. The corpses of heirless pers ons fail to evoke the Human Bondage* a
medical student is expected to have wit h
the patients in future and more so in a society of ours where bone and organ
sellers are available in every Cit y
of Joy not to talk of Dominique’s Wife of Job Charnock – Calcutta.
The best bones used to come in our state
from Calcutta it hila
had unending reservoir. Whit e-clean apron was stressed more than the dignit y of the dead, a new edit ion
of Dadhichi, to provide us, vajra of knowledge. And, naturally the
wisdom and humanit y are rare commodit ies seen and found among doctors.
In medieval days, the knowledge of Anatomy
was gathered by dissecting the slaves.
Not many changes we see even today despit e
the fact that models and dummies could be equally good, as the finest
dissecting exercises of Cunningham had long lost importance in the
surgical theaters. One of my tutors, Dr. U. P. Singh used to remark, on the
bold-typed description of an abnormal obturator artery, “More ink has been shed
than the blood for it , if it is cut, you can tie it ”
– diathermy was not popular in those days and, of course, this intelligent
teacher was a surgeon, not an anatomist.
Most of the good young teachers were passing
their days, wait ing for a call for
the clinical subjects. Probably, this is
one of the reasons for falling standards of these subjects; most of the
pre-clinical teachers of long duration were from the frustrated lots, the
reasons may be known only to them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* The autobiographic novel of Somerset Maugham
Also some were good, talented and
inspiring. I was told by an old staff of
dissection-hall that a pers onalit y not less than Prof. N. L. Mit ra had himself supervised the museum to make it up-to-date, before he left for Ranchi it ra had Honours in Surgery, but his father, a
Government servant counted that by joining Anatomy N. L. will be a Director,
which he did become before retirement.
But everyone was not N. L. Mit ra. If one would have asked a rickshaw-puller to
go to the quarters of our Anatomy Prof. B. N. Sinha, he must have taken him to
the palatial building of the professor of Medicine, B. N. Sinha.
Later, I had also seen the full skeleton of
a doctor, Hukum Singh Virk, in the Govt.
Medical College ,
Amrit sar it h due honour in the
museum.
The centenary issue of The Medical Annual
analyzed the developments in Medicine in the preceding 100 years in three
phases—knowledge of Anatomy, Physiology and the bombardment by
Electronics. Why it
has not been appreciated, that I cannot say?
(The Annual also stated that the greatest discovery of 100 years
is the search of the fact that glucose is absorbed faster wit h sodium – Oral Rehydration Therapy. I think, people of Gujarat
taking sugar in every food, including pulse, must be knowing it since long).
For me, however, recognizing cutaneous
nerves and remembering different relations, attachments, etc. were so boring
that I used to chat wit h my friend
Akhilesh (later he joined the BSF) in a corner, behind the almirahs. One of the
friends had already lost my dissection-box and further being a vegetarian, I
never liked to work wit h a smelling
corpse. I had dissected only one day in my life, superficial fascia of
thigh. I preferred not to purchase a new scalpel and to have a bird’s eye-view
on the dissected parts (by friends), to recognize structures, at the fag end of
long periods, spent in gossiping. The
other four friends of my group were happy that they were having better opportunit y to dissect.
This selfish
motto of medicos gets strengthened in successive years, seeing the slides under
microscope in Histology or Histopathology laboratories or palpating a spleen,
even of infective endocardit is, despit e warnings not to do so, or on auscultation saying
a ‘beautiful’ murmur.
I wonder, how it
can be beautiful suppose you would be finding on auscultation in your own
precordium any such murmur and the practice of pasting notices ‘not to disturb
serious patients’ was a practice of the past. This selfish attit ude results in future as professional rivalry and
all sorts of negligence and malpractices in my opinion.
I was better in Physiology and Biochemistry,
I had also a notion that these were necessary for studying Medicine and to pass
MRCP had become my aim like Dr. N. P. Mishra, wit h
whose family I came in contact through my mother’s illness in those days.
Dr. Mishap’s residence was in the
neighbourhood of the Sangh Karyalya where I was residing. His son, Belu, was attracted to me as he was
to appear for the PMT. When I asked him
for an appointment from his father for the treatment of my mother, he arranged it . I had writ ten a detailed history of my mother’s illness,
which probably impressed Dr. Mishra and I later knew in my clinical years that
he was a perfect case historian.
Gradually, my bondage wit h his family grew and I started to get a treatment
anyone can deserve from one’s parents. I
used to read from the books of his daughter, Kumkum, (one year senior to me)
but my mood was not stable. Sometimes I
had the memory of Ranchi which had become my second home so much so that in the
immediate vacation I went to Ranchi and not to my parents and that
agonized Dr. B. N. Prasad and it took him much pains to explain to me the realit ies of social life.
I was often thinking to leave medical
science and prepare for BSc so as to compete for the UPSC.
Dr. N. P. Mishra was a hard taskmaster. He used to say, “Read Cunningham 100
times.” I used to reply, “I have read three times, now I cannot.” Usually Mrs.
Mishra favoured me and saved me from chiding.
I was bluffing to Dr. Mishra as well. I used
to read the newspaper in his home after coming from the college. Whenever it
was late and I was guessing that he might ask me to study, I promptly used to
ask the meaning of some words from the newspaper. Being a good teacher in explaining a word he
used to forget to chide (I used to ask some words which many a time I might
knew already). My bonds of relationship
wit h his family still exist.
Knowing
that silence has power, I, once, observed silence for a whole week. Now, I do wonder how it
could be possible. After the silence, the experience was that it was difficult to speak immediately for a few
moments,
I had difficulty in following books in
difficult English but I did not opt for help-books as learnt from my past
experiences. In later years, I have
received this complaint from students all over the country.
Though I was better in Physiology and
Biochemistry, I could hardly pass in Anatomy.
The examiner, Prof. N. L. Mit ra,
chided me so much on the Histology slide that in the surface marking it was difficult for me to tell greater trochanter
lies medial or lateral, whether it
was out of nervousness or ignorance, I cannot recall.
A few months before that examination, an
ex-student of the college, Dr. A. N. Achari had come from the USA it . He regretted and then clarified why he had
left it but thanked me a lot for it after the lecture was over. I was a second year student and I became hero
of the evening. I had read about it
in the book of Physiology. Much later, I read about Achari’s references in Brain’s
Neurology.
When I was given a slide of thymus in
Histology, and as I was trying to say
those things to Prof. Mit ra, neit her could he comprehend nor could I answer the
basics of thymic histology.
My examination in Biochemistry was equally
interesting. The external examiner from
Orissa asked me about the proximate principles of diet. He did not protest on my inclusion of water
in it and asked me about water
metabolism. Then he wanted to know the
compound having lesser number of peptides than octapeptides like vasopressin,
which I had already told. I repeatedly
told him that I did not know but he was adamant that I knew it , probably on the assumptions of the standard of
my previous reply. Few minutes elapsed and he was about to ask me to go out
that I sparked, “Glutathione.”
Then he asked me it s
chemistry. I narrated the names of amino acids, I had remembered from the first
letter of the words of the name of a beautiful girl of my class,
glutamyl-cysteinyl-glycine (for G. C. George, later I knew she was actually
Gisy George).
Then
I went into the depth of the HMP shunt, etc. and when it s
utilit y in eye metabolism came, I
hypothesised that in the scorching sun (like in Egypt Egypt it tle relations wit h the living and my professor of Surgery, H. N.
Dwivedi, after internship wanted me to join Surgery, but I was obsessed wit h
Medicine.
The day I entered in medical college, I
could smell what ‘casteism’ is, and hit herto,
I knew merely the castes. One friend of
mine, by name Ajay Kumar Jha, asked me what my name was. Since ‘Thakur’ is an ambiguous tit le, he further asked the name of my father. He had a copybook wit h
him and probably some senior had instructed him to note the names of all Mait hil Brahmin students wit h
addresses, maybe for the matrimonial purposes or caste meetings. I told him my
father’s name and the tit le ‘Sharma’
which was still more ambiguous for him.
I then chided him that there was no need for such rubbish things like
asking caste, etc.
At the same time my name prompted some
Bhumihar students and they started showing me respect, as according to them I
was the best student among them as per the PMT posit ion. But I
had a day-scholar friend Harsh Narayan Jha and one day we were talking in Mait hili. Soon
they discovered that I was not a Bhumihar and their reverence for me vanished.
In the Physiology Department we were asked
to fill a form where caste was to be mentioned.
As per my old practice, I mentioned Hindu. But the teacher further queried that Hindu is
not a caste and on his insistence, I had to writ e
down Brahmin. After a few years a
student strongly protested against it
and this practice was abandoned. He later became an active member of the NMO –
Bharat or Prabhat, I cannot recall now.
I never attended any caste meeting in my
whole career nor did anyone dare invit e
me. It was so much so that I failed to attract Mait hil
Brahmins even in the Sangh and later also in the NMO.
When I came to Ranchi it h
Dr. K. K. Sinha. Once, Saryu Mishra, the then Health Minister of Bihar * had come to the RMCH for inspection and in the
mess I told the boys that some
years earlier there had been a proposal for my marriage wit h
his niece. The boys exclaimed that it could not be possible as I was a Bhumihar. I only smiled.
Once at Darbhanga, I had gone to meet a
gentleman. I asked him, “You are a member of the governing body of the Tilak College it hi as ‘blood donation
day’ for long, so this query came to my mind. The gentleman replied that init ially they thought for the name of Pt. Ramnandan
Mishra as he was from their communit y
but Ramnandan Mishra did not agree and afterwards they could find that Tilak
was also a Bhumihar, which led them to name the college after him**. He told it
quit e innocently. If one happens to
go to the villages, it will be found
that people ask innocently, “Which Ashram you belong to?”
But the people who discovered Gandhi was a Baniya
and Maharana Pratap and Kunwar Singh were Rajputs may not be believed to
be so innocents. Believe me, there are
colleges in the aforesaid names existing in the township of Darbhanga it
does not appear so in their preambles.
* Including
Jharkhand
**The
college was letter renamed after the father of the donor, instead of Tilak.
One of my friends once approached
me to deliver a talk on Kunwar Singh.
The celebrations were to be held in the DMC it self. I choose the topic of the talk – Kunwar
Singh: A Historical Forecaster. I spoke for 30 minutes (in candle light due
to load-shedding). Presiding over the meeting, a teacher of History appreciated
my talk as well as my request for maintaining silence in the meeting though
electrical failure had init ially
caused some noise. But later, as I could
gather the motives behind organising the programme, I felt pit y on myself.
Similarly, I found the Vidyapati Samaroh
organised by my caste-men. After the first day, I refrained from going
there. I am still a crit ic of any such function on caste basis and as also
based on region or even language. Every
member of all other communit ies
should be welcomed and invit ed to
join even for the prasad of Chit ragupta
Puja or for the Sangeet Sandhya of Vidyapati.
Vidyapati sang for all, Vishwakarma is the
Creator of the Universe and Chit ragupta
audit s the doings of all human
beings. Let us not bring them down to
the stature of a pigmy for one’s selfish ends. So, is the case of Ambedkar,
Birsa and others? What would these great
men and gods be thinking in Heaven about such deeds?
Our Anatomy professor, Dr. B. N. Sinha, was
also the president of the Rotract Club, founded by some enthusiastic
medicos. Once, he called me and asked me
to teach Russian language and also two other girls of my class were asked to
teach French and German in the evening classes. We all agreed.
In the inaugural ceremony, the
Vice-Chancellor and DIG and others came.
In fact, there was a large gathering of doctors and students. I was also
asked to speak something on the occasion.
I found everybody was speaking in English. So, I also spoke for the first time in
English. I had much difficulty. Imagine, me, a first year boy in an august
gathering and my maiden speech in a language not much known to me. I traced the linguistic pedigree of Russian
and it s relations wit h Sanskrit . One senior doctor, B. Jha, asked me some
phrases in English, which I translated into Russian.
I could attract only two students, as I was
not a girl. Among girls too, beautiful
Gisy attracted many more students than the teacher of German, Anima Xess, a
tribal girl from Ranchi
Unfortunately,
due to the unethical atmosphere evolved, the classes of the Rotract club were
not only closed forever but also the principal had to instruct to close down
the Rotract club as the foundation of the Club it self
was not consistent wit h the tradit ions of the soil.
We remembered
for long, that a member, Shashi had writ ten
a letter on some problems of women to Indira Gandhi. He received
a reply from her that was addressed as ‘Madam Shashi’. I think Mrs. Gandhi had recognised the character of
the club, i.e., femininit y in
thoughts at least.
The National
Emergency was clamped and later I joined the hostel to appear in the
examination which passed off smoothly and we returned wit h
stethoscopes – like a vestigial organ, a
ubiquit ous symbol of medicos and
also symbolising a life in us after dissecting the dead, after passing the
guarded iron curtain of the second year.
In my first
clinical posting in Surgery, Dr. H. N. Dwivedi asked me if I had saluted
dissection-hall before I left. I replied,
“Yes, sir. Thrice.”
Bhagwan Dhanwantari
No comments:
Post a Comment