How Smart was my Father?

Dad grew up on a farm.  One that still was doing things the way they'd been done, well, forever.  There were still a few horses.  The language spoken at home was German.  That's also what was used at the nearby school house for younger kids.  My memory is telling me this was referred to as "The German School".

Maybe some people thrive on the daily routines and the long repeating cycles of farm life.  Dad, not so much.  He had the motivation to get off to the big city and do something different.  And the ability.  He was Valedictorian of his - admittedly small - high school class.  I never asked him, but its my assumption that the student body got smaller as kids decided, or were told, "Enough of that nonsense, we need your help at home."  (Google Translate would put this roughly as: "Genug von diesem Unsinn, Zeit, nach Hause zu kommen und zu arbeiten", but that would be classic High German, they spoke a sort of rustic dialect called "Plattdeutch" 

Going through the detritus of my parent's house I found many artifacts.  Lots relating to my own academic career.  These are sobering.  I clearly thought I was smarter than the record indicates.  Also, a few fascinating things from my father, who appears to have been smarter than I thought.  Or was he just an exemplar of a generation that valued learning more?

Here's a notebook from what seems to have been his sophomore year in college:

Notebooks were classier back then I guess.

It was from some sort of anatomy and physiology class.  There's detailed, hand written charts describing how frogs respond to assorted stimuli after various parts of their brains have been destroyed.  Macabre stuff, but interesting.  

Also various stuff on human anatomy, bones of the human skull for instance.  In addition to the elegant hand writing it looks as if some of the illustrations - also quite good - were his work.  Examples of my own work from that era would do me no credit.

It's interesting to see where our careers overlapped in time.   I found a few examples of his hospital dictation work.  All of it precise, detailed, and with perfectly fluent thought....

This was from 1987, when he'd been in practice for thirty plus years and I for a couple.  The procedure for this work - it was a discharge summary as it happens - was to sit down with the chart and dictate it.  Later it would be transcribed and you'd sign it.  The point, at least then, was to tell the story, and to tell it in a fashion that would make it easy to follow in case some other physician had to figure out what was going on.  You have to prioritize things.  You also have to include anything that might become important at some time in the future.  It is a difficult form of writing.  

Now of course this is essentially a Lost Art.  I've written in the past about the Pros (able to access and link to other information) and Cons (templates make doctors lazy) of Electronic Medical Records.   As I've said earlier, my dad was never lazy.  If he said - as in this summary - that a patient had "..an indurated saphenous vein in the right calf..."  Then she damn well did.  

What exactly makes one an excellent physician?  Hard working helps.  Smart helps.  In the era my dad was practicing being "Old School" probably helped too.  I remember one of his colleagues describing him as "One of the Great Gentlemen of Medicine". 

It's probably the epitaph he'd be most proud of.  If he probably had the intelligence to succeed in some other field he may not have had the instincts for say, business.  The one mild regret I heard him once express really surprised me.   Evidently when he was stationed in Germany he had the chance to travel around a bit.  At one point he was interested in visiting Vienna, which was then the mecca of the new discipline of psychiatry.  How my father, that smart but in many ways naive man would have dealt with the outer fringe of a crazy world is hard to imagine....