IMPRINTS of Temple Medical School By Carson D. Schneck, MD ’59, PhD ’65
When you drive north or south on North Broad Street, you cannot help being startled by the striking architecture of the Medical Education and Research Building of Temple University's School of Medicine, and the array of Temple Health Science Center buildings stretching four blocks along Broad Street, towering above North Philadelphia. If you enter these buildings, you'll be further impressed by the high-tech facilities available for education and patient care. Our physical facilities make very favorable imprints, but the most potent and lasting imprints we have to offer are our people imprints, the imprints that we make upon those we educate. While we often think of ourselves as self-made, we are really amalgams of the imprints made upon us by other people. Obviously the seminal imprint upon each of our lives was provided by our parents. Their DNA and their behaviors and circumstances played a major role in shaping our personality, knowledge base, habits, attitudes and prejudices. In childhood, we were further imprinted by our neighbors,
teachers and friends. College stretched our minds further, and we can all recall those special professors, coaches and advisors who helped mold us into who we are today. At Temple University School of Medicine, it was the faculty and support personnel who exposed us to the diverse and exciting world of medicine, helped us sort through the plethora of choices for our future life's work, and facilitated our achievement of the MD, MS, and/or PhD degree. They accomplished this not only by the transmission of didactic medical information, but also by the contagion of their enthusiasm. They were the role models and motivators for our early medical growth. Some of our faculty got to know us personally, demonstrating real concern for our personal and professional growth during medical school and beyond. After graduating, we continued being imprinted by our postgraduate mentors, our colleagues, patients, spouses, children and others close to us. Imprinting is life-long and can be very subtle. We learn new facts, new
ways of thinking about or applying those facts, new procedures and new attitudes by formal instruction or by example, by reading, by watching television, by attending lectures and professional meetings. The things we learn become our facts, our procedures, our attitudes, our personality traits. We use them so routinely that we don't even remember from whence or whom they came. Imprinting is clearly a two-way street. Throughout our lives, we too imprint on our parents, spouse, children, friends, and patients. We all have the potential to imprint in positive and negative ways. When each of us leaves this world, we leave nothing behind of greater substance than the imprints we have made on others. Think about it: those imprints, positive or negative, have the potential to cascade down through many generations … possibly ad infinitum. I'd like to take a look at some of the history of Temple University School of Medicine and its people to see what kinds of imprints have been made on us and the world around us. I want to
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