Persevering
The rail accident gave Morris Hirsch pause for thought. But ultimately he decided to bite the bullet and spend the next five years as a medical student.
The rail accident bothered Morris Hirsch all through the Christmas holidays. But he decided to bite the bullet and spend the next five years as a medical student.
He got used to the smell of formalin that permeates your hair, clothes and everything else. Over the year he and his five dissection mates acquired an affectionate attachment to the cadaver which they called Jimmy. They traced the systems with painstaking dissections.
They had moved up from the main campus in Milner Park to the Medical School on Hospital Hill. A mile nearer home, it was much more convenient for Morris. It was next to the Johannesburg General Hospital and the contrasting jerry-built Non-European Hospital.
The Medical School was small compared to the two massive replacements of later decades, but at the time was considered quite imposing with its Roman facade. It was well established although it's four pioneer students had graduated only ten years before in 1924. Standards were high. Morris was fortunate in having the wealth of clinical and postmortem grounding. With a diverse population in the city, he was exposed to a wide range and severity of pathology. South African doctors were the most sought after during the war.
In third year, he attended postmortems–with the gross slashing and organ extraction, horrid smells and gory mess made of a human being. He never fully overcame his revulsion although, over the decades, he performed many postmortems himself.
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
Excerpt from Dr. Morris Isaac Hirsch's unpublished memoirs: Hirsch Archives.
Photo Credit: <https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/x346ft40j>.