Assume the Position: Memoirs of an Obstetrician Gynecologist by Richard Houck MD Read Free Book Online Page B

prestige, or stature.  Gonorrhea was endemic in Philadelphia at the time. Hospitals and their medical personnel were certainly not immune, although I managed somehow to dodge the bullet.
     
         The year of my medical school graduation, the 1976 Olympics saw Franz Klammer and his epic downhill ski race win him a gold medal at the Innsbruck Olympics.  I watched this event live on TV.  Little did I know I would have occasion to meet him later in life.   To watch him go up against Mother Nature like that was most impressionable at that point in my life.  Literally on the edge, seemingly in control and out of control at the same time was often the same thrill and feeling I had in my chosen profession, and often on a daily basis.  The trick was learning how to master it and when to bail out!
     
         Before leaving Hahnemann during my fourth year of medical school, I was asked to serve on the medical school admissions committee.  I saw this as some sort of personal vindication that I had now come full circle from my college thesis and my original rejection notices from medical schools.  I enjoyed reviewing applications of new potential medical students and my role in the decision making process.  This was quite a turn of events five years after being rejected from medical school myself.
     
         Choosing where to do my postgraduate training, internship and residency was a major event for a graduating medical student.  There was a matching program that required applications, personal travel, interviews at the hospitals with the program directors, letters of recommendation, then finally ranking of the favorite programs by the applicants and favorite applicants by the programs. On a countrywide match day at an appointed time universal to all programs, we received an envelope with the name of the program with which we matched.  We were then bound to attend this program by prior agreement, so it was a very exciting event.  I matched with my first choice, Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.
    They accepted only four applicants in the entering internship class for obstetrics and gynecology.
     

     
        (The four exhausted interns in my first year at Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia.  Left to right, Steven Block, Bruce Rosen, Betty Pitcher, and myself.)
     
     
    Pennsylvania Hospital, founded in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond to care for the "sick, poor and insane of Philadelphia", is located at 8 th and Spruce streets, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  It housed the Nation’s first medical library and first surgical amphitheater. 
     
     

    (18 th Century Pennsylvania Hospital)
     
    It currently has over 500 beds, 25,000 yearly admissions, and over 4500 births per year. Dr. Benjamin Rush, medical researcher, social reformer, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was on staff.  The ‘Lying In” or maternity hospital was started in 1803. The cornerstone of the Lying In hospital is located at 8th and Spruce Streets. Benjamin West, early American artist, donated “Christ healing the sick in the Temple”, which now hangs in the historical wing of the hospital.  Connecting the modern hospital with the historical wing is a long hallway covered with bronze plaques bearing the name of every intern who served the ‘sick, poor and insane” of Philadelphia from 1751 until the present, including my name somewhere on those walls. Located in the old historical Society Hill section of Philadelphia, a stone’s throw from the Delaware River separating Pennsylvania from New Jersey, it was a quick wintery jog in the early morning from there to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, down to the Delaware river, and back to the hospital, a path I often ran at 5:30 in the morning.
     
         During my internship I spent three months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) on a neonatology rotation.  Neonatology at the time was a new specialty in the pediatrics realm, caring for sick