'Tis the season. For reunions -- I'm attending my 50th Yale Medical School reunion this weekend. I would gladly go to medical school there again. It was where I developed a strong foundation for a medical and neuroscience career that included curiosity, a thirst for reading and writing, and a respect for listening, especially to patients.
And what other medical school would have allowed me to play rehearsals and concerts several nights every week for four years? Bach cantatas and chamber music at the Yale School of Music and orchestral music in the New Haven Symphony and several other nearby regional orchestras, some conducted by Leonard Bernstein's conducting fellows with soloists like Arthur Rubinstein, Benny Goodman, and Mstislav Rostropovich.
At the time I couldn't avoid anxiety over being distracted from my medical studies. Now I am convinced it was exactly what I should have done--for my sanity then and for my life afterwards. I hope music protected me from the dehumanization that medical schools (Yale excepted) are so good at instilling in students. Nowhere else could I have had a better medical education. Now retired from medicine, I can still play music.
'Tis the season also for Commencement speeches. A brilliant one at Washington University by the film maker, Ken Burns, is my favorite so far this year. "Wash U" is where cynicism set in after the Army and the Vietnam War interrupted my happy University of Virginia postgraduate education. Burns explains that feeling -- I still feel it -- and offers good therapy, such as replacing cynicism by its "old fashioned antidote, skepticism."
Excerpts from Burns' finale don't capture the full essence of the address:
Remember: Black lives matter. All lives matter.
Reject fundamentalism wherever it raises its ugly head. It's not civilized. Choose to live in the Bedford Falls of "It's a Wonderful Life," not its oppressive opposite, Pottersville...
Don't confuse monetary success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once warned me that "careerism is death"...
Listen to jazz. A lot. It is our music.
Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all -- not the car, not the TV, not the computer or the smartphone.
Do not allow our social media to segregate us into ever smaller tribes and clans, fiercely and sometimes appropriately loyal to our group, but also capable of metastasizing into profound distrust of the other...
Convince your government that the real threat, as Lincoln knew, comes from within. Governments always forget that, too. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy...
Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of the country -- they just make the country worth defending...
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