Always Learning

The saga of sifting through my dad's belongings continues. One of the last few boxes contained fifty pounds of surgery research. Some of the weight came from archived copies of journals, but most of it from pages upon pages of research notes, bloodwork printouts, and draft copies of articles that my dad had worked on.

One of my favorite childhood memories comes from one night when I was about nine or ten (I think) and I couldn't sleep. It was a summer night, one of the many summers when we were young that we spent at the house where Dad and Nora lived. It was a huge mansion from the hay day of the silk industry in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania: 533 4th Street, to be exact. I came downstairs and found my dad sitting in one of two rocking chairs on the long wrap-around porch at the front of the house. He was reading a surgery journal in preparation for the next day's work.

I plopped myself in the other rocker and told him that I couldn't sleep. He invited me to sit out in the warm night for a while. While he read, I noticed in my insomniac stupor that a glass of clear liquid with two ice cubes and a wedge of lime sat on the table between us. I asked my dad if I could try some. He told me that of course I could--knowing full well the effects of the juniper liquor on the body of someone as young as I.

I took a couple of sips--I don't remember if I liked it--and put the glass back. In short order I yawned big and declared that I thought I could go to sleep now. My dad put down his article and walked me up to bed.

It's my first memory of encountering Dad's habit of continual learning. Perhaps surgeons need to do it more than most, but even outside of his career he kept the habit. That memory is also the moment when I think I acquired a taste for gin and tonic.

Based on the tons of paperwork I found, it seems that my dad worked pretty diligently to get his work published. Here's a page from the proof copy of an article that was published in a British medical journal, including one of the surgical photographs into which my dad invested so much time and effort. It's from an article on "aneurysm of a common digital artery: resection and vein graft":

Dad had a special interest in surgery of the hand. His specialty was further focused on common and occupational injuries to the hand. Here's the cover page of a draft article on "Bacterial Colonization in Lawn Mower Injuries to the Hand":

You can imagine what the conversation around the supper table was like when we asked Dad what he was doing at work. Of course he loved to talk about it, which means that my brother and I quickly acquired stomachs that could handle eating and talking about gall bladder removal at the same time.

Always learning, and always teaching. That was Dad.

~emrys