Training in Charity

Thank you.

So we are here to talk about your novel, which is called Training in Charity.

But before we do that, would you like to introduce yourself so listeners know who I'm talking to today?

Certainly.

I'm Alan Saxon.

I had a career as a general surgeon, but I attended medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans.

So part of my training was in the legendary hospital in New Orleans, Charity Hospital, which was the second oldest public hospital in the United States, founded in 1736. one month after Bellevue in New York opened

fantastic and that of course is the setting for your novel which we're going to come on and talk about now obviously you say you are a retired surgeon but I know from our chat before we started this podcast you are not entirely retired and that's not just writing is it so what what do you what do you keep yourself busy doing these days

Well, even though I was what we would call a community surgeon, I didn't practice in a medical school setting.

I had a lot of contacts around the city of Chicago.

And when I retired, representatives from two different medical schools asked me if I would like to teach.

And so I currently am on faculty at both Rosalind Franklin University and Northwestern University.

And I primarily teach very basic skills such as physical diagnosis, history taking, and I do a program at Northwestern that's entitled Patient-Based Learning, which gives first year students the opportunity to see how the scientific concepts that they're learning actually apply to clinical medicine by studying cases that are related to those topics.

And I think that sort of early clinical learning is so key.

I teach some undergraduates from Sheffield where they have something called early years experience, which is, again, their theme that they may be doing cardiovascular science in physiology and anatomy, but they come out to me and for an afternoon they meet somebody who has had a heart attack or a valve replacement and And then they actually talk about what that meant for them.

And I just think that is, you know, is so much of a better way of learning than when I went to medical school where we didn't go anywhere near any patients until our third year.

Well, we started seeing patients in the second semester of our second year, but there was an exercise which is repeated in my book called bullpen, which was a Saturday morning exercise.

held in an old-fashioned amphitheater that was on the actual surgical floors at Charity with the high-tiered, semi-circular tiled seats like in all the famous paintings of the Gross Clinic and things like that.

And senior students were given an hour with a patient while the department had grand rounds.

And then they came in and with the patient, because we didn't have our privacy rules then, they actually came into the auditorium with the patient, presented their history and physical and could be quizzed on any aspect of that patient's care.

And it was pretty terrifying for a lot of people.

But if you really paid attention, It was all structured so that you walked out with a long-lasting lesson.

And I still remember cases that were presented when I was a freshman in medical school.

Everybody went, even if they hadn't had any clinical experience yet.

And I remember some of those cases from my freshman year, which is pretty good because I'm in the age group now where I'm not expected to remember what I had for breakfast.