Photo by one of my fellow med students. Washington, DC. c. 1966. Goldfinger family album

By Paul Goldfinger, M.D.

Four of us rotated together through the clinical years of medical school. Bill was from Utah,  Bob from New Jersey, Dennis from Pennsylvania and myself from New Jersey.  We were in Washington, D.C. at the George Washington University School of Medicine.   The med school was in a crummy part of town with strip joints around the corner—an excellent environment to study anatomy.  The school was a brick structure from the 19th century where we had lectures in a big amphitheatre like in Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson.”   There were 94 guys and 6 women.

GWU Medical School at 1335 H Street. It was replaced in 1970 by a new school at Foggy Bottom.

The Dean, John Parks, was a big man—a former football player for the University of Wisconsin.  He was a well known Ob-Gyn specialist.  The students called him  “The Patriarch of the Pelvis.”   So Ob-gyn was a big deal at our school.  Our Ob-gyn rotation was at a large city hospital–D.C. General, which was also ancient and which no longer exists.  That was a rough old place with big public wards and students coming from the three med schools in Washington:  G.W., Georgetown and Howard universities.

We got to deliver babies there. We would be assigned to a woman as she came through the door in labor.  We would stick with her during labor and then we would deliver the baby. What a thrill!   Then we had two postpartum patients and we wore two hats:  obstetrician and pediatrician.

One time Dennis called me. He delivered a baby, but he couldn’t deliver the placenta.  I gave a gentle tug and nothing happened, so my contribution was to call the intern. He came and then called the resident. He came and found out that there was another baby in there.  In those days the diagnosis of twins was sometimes difficult.

At  GWU hospital, it was a more genteel experience in Ob because the patients were private. But I delivered babies there also, although the supervision was a bit tighter than at DC General.  They allowed me to do a minor surgical procedure called an episiotomy where a small incision is made to allow the baby’s head to emerge more easily. That was satisfying for me, the mother and the baby.  Then I got to sew it all up —nice and neat. We also learned to use forceps for difficult deliveries—that procedure I disliked intensely.  I kept score in my OB book :  30 babies delivered; 20 were little girls. I couldn’t account for that distribution.

I loved Ob, but, in the end, I chose cardiology. Two years later, as a medical resident at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC,  I was walking in front, on Madison Avenue, on  a summer morning, at about 2 am.   I was on call;  they had asked me to see a patient in the next building.  Just then a taxi screeched to a halt at the curb. The cabbie, seeing my white uniform with a stethoscope around my neck, urged me to look into the back seat.

There was a woman about to give birth—the baby’s head was crowning.  So I jumped in and delivered a boy—that was the last time I would ever have the privilege to deliver a baby;  and  was I  grateful for that rotation in Washington, D.C.

ANNETTE HANSHAW