The year was 1946. The scene was City Hospital, later renamed Louisville General Hospital (now University of Louisville Hospital) and affectionately referred to by the staff as Louisville "Generous" Hospital.

The teaching staff at U of L was depleted because of World War II and doctors were still in short supply. There was the usual number of embryonic docs, however, who were students. I was a junior living in "Old Holly-wood," the affectionate name for the dorm for working students, interns and residents. What a place to live!

No air conditioning, so the windows were wide open in the summertime and noises from the ambulances pierced the midnight hours. Across the driveway was the psychiatric ward and the noises from disturbed, psychotic patients penetrated Hollywood night and day. We had few drugs to calm agitated patients in those days and so they often shouted until they fell asleep from exhaustion.

There was only one hall telephone to a floor. It rang incessantly all night it seemed, and the first doc to finally wake up in disgust would answer and then call whomever to the phone.

Ugh! What a system!

Imagine trying to sleep on those hot summer nights in such conditions. How I ever existed for two years that way still amazes me.

Every fourth night I was on duty in the emergency room and often I was up much of the night working. No chance to make up for lost sleep either.

The next morning in the hospital amphitheater during a lecture on who knows what, I slept with my head in my hand and my elbow on the arm rest. I would wake up with a start during the perfunctory applause at the end of the lecture.

Fortunately we had note takers to keep in edited order all that was said, and I got by.

Book learning was surely important, but without our hands-on experience on the wards and clinics and especially in the emergency room we would have been sorry docs indeed. For working all night every fourth night I got my room-such as it was-my food in the hospital cafeteria-such as it was-and my uniforms washed and ironed-such as they were.

Of all the jobs available to medical students in the hospital, the emergency room appointment was the most coveted. Battle experience on the front lines either made you or broke you and the emergency room exposed us to the worst and the most, at times coming at us so fast we could hardly keep up.

After two years of that, we fledgling "shave tail" emergency room doctors felt like we had seen it all and done it all. We regarded ourselves as the Marine Corps of medicine and were rightfully proud of our knowledge and prestige.

And so, like every learning experience, we learned by doing, by making mistakes and by not giving up.

We tried to learn patience by [enduring] repeated exposure to alcoholics, the lacerated, the beaten, the yelling of obscenities and trying to suture up people while three or four cops held them on the table. We tried to learn compassion for the poor, the hopeless and the handicapped.

And finally, we tried to learn to quickly assess a situation of major trauma and multiple victims, to do first things first and organize our work, and to save lives, relieve suffering and calm the hysterical.

We learned and learned and learned.

It wasn't easy. It was demanding and at times confusing and frustrating. It took commitment and dedication. But I loved it. I had found my place.

I was going to be a doctor. I was determined to be a good doctor.

Taken from "Referees, Docs & God: Journal of a Country Doctor" by Donald Martin '47M.