ABSTRACT
It was a bright Baltimore morning, back in 1946, when about 90 eager young men and women were assembled on the green lawn in front of the University of Maryland Medical School administration building. They were from all over the country, and having applied for admission to the Medical School and, most important, having been accepted for the Freshman class of 1946, had been told to gather here at the School. I was one of them and I remember that I didn’t know one soul in the group. We did not know what they, the School, wanted from us but somehow it felt pretty good to be asked to be here for whatever the School wanted from us. Then came the directive: divide into groups of four. This is not easy to do when you don’t know anybody. But somehow, I really don’t know how, I found myself with three other guys who didn’t know any better what the hell was going on and we were a group of four: Larry Demarest, Jay Bisgyer, Joe Lichtenberg, and me. Then we were told to go into the Anatomy Laboratory where each group was assigned a cadaver. Our cadaver had been an old Black man and we named him something but I forgot what. Thus I first met Joe, Jay, and Larry. We became cadaver mates and also friends. Larry married a classmate of ours who became a psychoanalyst. We lost touch with each other which I regret. Joe, Jay, and I became good friends, indeed, now 64 years later, we are still very good friends and frequently in touch with each other by visit or by phone.
