Build It and They Will Come
“It” was a baseball field, but rather than an Iowa corn field, this one was on the grounds of the venerable Philadelphia General Hospital (built by Ben Franklin) where I took my internship.
Medical graduates must serve at least a year of training before being eligible to practice medicine. The internship no longer exists as such, perhaps because the memo about the Emancipation Proclamation finally got to the powers that be. As was typical of the time, I worked 90-plus-hour weeks for $100 a month. It had been $59 the year before but some interns’ wives marched to City Hall with a contingent of reporters and applied for welfare, embarrassing the mayor and his cronies enough to get us a 70% raise.
There were 90 of us from all over the country. It was an old-fashioned tour called a “rotating” internship, with thirteen 4-week assignments ruled over by faculty from Philadelphia’s five medical schools. Penn, right across the fence, was the best, and I lucked out in getting several of their best teachers.
Our only outlets were the baseball field and poker. Philly had its snowiest winter on record with three 18-inch blizzards, but during the warm months we had a league with several teams. The doctors had two and were usually no match for the orderlies, techs, kitchen crew, security, etc. but our guys were good. I had the honor of hitting the year’s most talked-about home run which broke a window on the fifth floor of the student nurses’ dorm (for the single guys the 500 future RN’s from the hills of Pennsylvania and West Virginia did constitute a third outlet, but I wouldn’t know about that).
Across the street was the Palestra, a popular venue for sports. To our dismay we discovered after a rainy spring night that a number of cars belonging to people attending a boxing match had parked illegally on our baseball field, leaving nasty ruts. Most were big black Cadillacs with New Jersey plates. The administration would not respond to our pleas, so next time our field was misused certain interns went out and flattened one tire on each car. There was a lot of cursing in Italian at about 11 PM, but the field was left alone for a few weeks. Next time they tried, each car got TWO flat tires. Now there is a major difference between having one flat and two. The last car didn’t leave the lot until almost dawn. But the field was ruined and our season ended early.
Our class showed its mettle early. We had been warned by the outgoing group that the administration was going to put a divider along the tray line in the cafeteria so that everyone had to pass through single-file. Our meals were free and time was precious so we’d grab our grub and head straight for a table. Soon after we started an ugly plastic barrier went up, preventing us from breaking out of line. It lasted a day. A furious administrator called an emergency meeting of our 90 rebels and demanded a confession, whereupon all 90 raised a hand and admitted fault.
The next week an even uglier partition was erected, this time anchored by a very sturdy pole through the floor and ceiling. One of the locals in our group had an uncle with a machine shop; this time the removal was challenging but by 2 a.m. the monstrosity was in pieces on the floor. The head honcho called a truce and we promised not to destroy any more city property.
The poker games were great fun and intense. About eight or nine of us were regulars, and what made the risk manageable was the presence of two Irani doctors on fellowship who seemed to have a limitless supply of the Shah’s money and no idea how to play good poker. Every time they’d fill an inside straight we’d tell them how brilliantly they played, assuring enough money at the end of the night for the rest of us paupers. Our best player was a 6′7″ rube from Louisiana named Travis Jeter Harrison. He’d win forty dollars or more every game. It was odd that in our last game he was nowhere to be found - that is until he strolled in wearing an outrageous green plaid suit and said, “Ah wanna thank you boys fo’ bahin’ me this-heah suit!”
One night the game was disrupted by a yell from the first floor - “Chicky the cops!!” By the time the fuzz had run up three flights, seven of us were sitting in chairs in the lounge reading sections of last Sunday’s NY Times. Cards and dollars were nowhere to be seen.
Twelve months of tension came to a head the last night. Someone started a bonfire on our baseball diamond and soon hundreds of medical text books were ablaze. The fire was at least three stories high and attracted the Philly PD and FD. As the fire was extinguished by hoses, turning the former ball field into a smoking swamp, a police officer mounted the bleachers with a bullhorn to give us a lecture on civics. At that moment the wildest intern in our group, a full-blooded Cherokee from Oklahoma, came storming out of the kitchen on a hand-pumped cart, whooping as if on horseback, beer bottle in his free hand, picked up speed down the ramp and crashed into the bleachers, sending the sergeant face-first into the mud. We felt lucky to finish the year without criminal records.
A year later while serving my stint in the Public Health Service, I picked up a local California paper and read that a “crazed mob” of young doctors had run amok in the streets of Philadelphia, turning over a trolley car. Now why didn’t we think of that?
The old hospital is no more, a victim of progress. For two hundred years the Blockley Medical Society, as the training staff was called, turned out future physicians who went out into the world knowing how it felt to deliver a baby in an unheated, rat-infested tenement, how to tend to dying patients with no family to care, how to save premature babies in a low-tech world (my son Danny among them). I believe medicine is not well-served by having young doctors go straight from school to specialty training, but I’m glad I had the opportunity. Last time I visited in 1976 the old place had lost its accreditation and was eerie in its silence, like an empty cathedral. And fittingly, the former baseball field was now a parking structure.