The "good" Old Days

Henry   ---  Yes,  Dr. William Henry Gardner  (another Henry) was a good friend, classmate, and we interned together in Memphis.   We interns in Memphis at the University Hospital got a dollar a day, which was a dollar more than your dad got in his internship,  worked a 100 hour workweek, got occasional Sundays off but no holidays and didn’t know we were being exploited as that was the custom.  It is quite different these days I understand.  At the hospital in Memphis the interns’ quarters were in the hospital.  There was no individual paging system and the hospital loudspeakers went on until midnight to call you to take care of the emergencies.  One out of every three patients on the medical wards died, so there were always emergencies.  After midnight the one legged elevator operator would come to get you for emergencies.  He had a peg leg and you could hear him coming down the hall, clump, clump, clump, hoping he would pass by your door.  There were four of us to a room, so there was usually one on call all the time.   Sleep was always a precious item as we got so little of it.  The University Hospital was the only hospital in a hundred mile radius that would admit Afro-Americans, so one had to be very sick to get admitted.  That is why the death rate was so high.  Each ward had 36 beds and a student nurse would be in charge of two wards after midnight.  There were two night supervisor RN’s who patrolled the hospital corridors at night to see that there was no hanky-panky with the student nurses and to help with emergencies.  Those two old crones were really hardnosed  and the student nurses lived in fear of them.  The emergency/admitting area was staffed by three interns over a twenty-four hour period, so that was a highly desirable assignment as you had only an eight hour shift, averaging about two hundred patients per shift to triage, either to admit or send to the out-patient clinics for an appointment.   A medical student was asssigned to the ER to sew up the myriad lacerations that occurred from knife or razor fights .   It was an arduous but exciting time in one’s life.              Will Meriwether