Читать книгу The Making of a Physician - Sheldon Cohen M.D. FACP - Страница 3

I have decided to write an autobiography. Am I nationally or internationally famous? The answer is no, so who would care? Nobody, I’m sure. Being curious all my life about my ancestors, I’ve always wished I had more details about my grandparents, great grandparents and great-great grandparent’s lives. I try to learn all I can from living relatives, but all I’ve been able to glean is very little or nothing at all because my interest peaked too late in life and there was no one left to query. Therefore, I decided I would spare my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren that same frustration…if they should ever have it. Why do I have it? I don’t know except that I have become a writer (?) in my old age and have written many books as a way of keeping my aging brain intact. I can only hope that strategy is effective, but so far, it seems to be working; as I will soon be 83 years of age and still write. Notice there is no comment about the writing quality, which is not for me to say. I am confident, however, that my writing improves with time, practice and study. That opinion is mine and mine alone, so I continue to do my thing unencumbered by critical and professional comment. It is the best hobby I have ever embraced and I hope to continue it until I can no longer type or write.

Thinking it over, the best and most logical place to start this autobiography would be with the first memory of my life, so here goes.

The one thing I notice as I move further into seniority is the crispness of past memories. Now that I have time to think about the past—my mind not occupied by immediate work, home problems and challenges, it is incredible to me how some of those old memories parade through my consciousness like a three-dimensional color movie.

Do you recall your first memory? How old were you? Is it as distinct to you as mine is to me? I see it in my mind’s eye as if it happened yesterday. I remember the exact location. I was sitting on the second floor outside porch of a two flat on Sacramento Boulevard, a block or two north of Augusta Boulevard, a middle-class neighborhood on the near-northwest side of Chicago of mixed ethnic heritage principally Jewish first or second-generation refugees from Eastern Europe and Polish Catholics who lived together in sort of an uneasy truce. My mother was either sitting next to me, or I was sitting on her lap, possibly both. I was able to look over the cement and brick-topped guardrail, and strangely enough, I still feel the excitement I felt as I watched a parade marching through Humboldt Park across the street. I was three years old, so it had to be 1933, a crucial year in world history.

Roosevelt started his New Deal, a social and economic program geared to get the country out of the Depression, which started the end of 1929 about a month before I was born on November 16. In 1933, Hitler became German chancellor and assumed total control of Germany with all that would portend for the world the next twenty-two years. Hitler’s National Socialistic Deutcher Arbeiter Partie (National Socialist German Worker’s Party), or Nazis for short, opened Dachau concentration Camp, the first of many to come. Japan left the League of Nations. The United States repealed prohibition, created The Tennessee Valley Authority and completed Hoover Dam. Morgan Thomas Hunt of the California Institute of Technology won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity.” Erwin Schrodinger of Berlin University and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac of Cambridge University won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work clarifying Quantum Mechanics.

The world embarked upon changes for good and evil.

As I sat on that front porch and looked over the railing, soldiers marched on a diagonal street cutting through the park across from my home. They were dressed in what I would later recognize as World War I uniforms. I recall the ankle to knee khaki wrap that was such a distinctive part of the “doughboy’s” uniform. The troops in the front row carried American flags. I suspect that I was watching a Fourth of July parade. I remember that the day was clear and warm. I can even remember gazing at my mother who was watching me as I manifested the excitement of the moment. The expression on her face is still clear in my mind. Now I would interpret it is an expression of the love of a mother for her child. The only thing I’m not sure about watching the parade is if a marching band played Fourth of July songs. I think they did, but it was the visual presentation rather than the auditory one that imprinted on my mind forever.

And that was my first memory, a memory that I cherish because circumstances were to develop in the future that would change that relationship between a mother and her son almost forever, but that is for later on in my story.

I often wondered how a simple event like that remains so vivid. On that day and at that time, under whatever conditions, the visual experience remains a part of my cerebral circuitry and has occupied a prominent place ever since. What were the physiological and other conditions at the time that allowed the imprinting of such a long lasting memory?

Whenever I ask friends to tell me about their first memory, they usually draw a blank. There is one exception to this, and that is a cousin of mine, Harvey, who is certain he remembers passing through the birth canal. We all thought he was nuts, of course. “It’s a dream,” we said. However, later in life I read a report of a number of people who claim to remember their birth. Therefore, I prefer to lump my cousin in with this unusual group of people and accept that such a memory may be feasible. After all, no one can prove the converse.

One would think that a first memory involving a military parade would portend a military career for me, but I only spent two years in the army (during peacetime in the United States) and that is also a story for later on in my tale. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.

My maternal grandmother arrived in the United States in February of 1904 with my three-month-old future mother-to-be. Like all the other third-class immigrants of the time, when they landed in New York, they were required to pass through Ellis Island. They first settled in Rochester New York and later moved to Chicago. About twenty-five years later I was born on November 16, 1929 at Mount Sinai hospital, Chicago Illinois, a month after the great stock market crash that heralded the onset of the great Depression creating some of the economic conditions that would lead inevitably to the amazing history of the 1930’s, the decade that paved the way to World War II.