A Life Unveiled, by a Child of the DrumlinsAnonymous
General
A Life Unveiled, by a Child of the Drumlins
Anonymous
Girls -- Biography; Women physicians -- United States -- Biography; Young women -- Biography
pretty dimpled hands with pink finger tips--I used to note them when
she passed the trays with the anatomical specimens, and her dainty way
of using the towel after handling them. I have said that she was a
middle-aged woman, but I wonder if she was not younger than that: in
those days I regarded every one past the twenties as middle-aged, or
old.
“Dr. Caroline” instructed us that first year, in microscopy, too, and
was very exacting. I had no special aptitude for it, and was afraid
of making blunders. She was so deft, and I so awkward in preparing
specimens, often breaking the fragile cover-glasses and spoiling my
bits of tissue which she doled out to us as precious morsels. How
the smell of the oil of cloves which we used in the work brings up
those sessions in microscopy--the students seated at the long tables
“teasing” their specimens with the fine needles, and mounting and
labelling the minute scraps of tissue!
We had private quizz-classes among ourselves: Four of us girls met
for study in the evening--I say girls, the two others were no longer
girls; one was probably twenty-five, the other perhaps near thirty.
The younger of these, Miss Thorndike, was also from the Empire State,
a bright, capable person, used to city life, a striking, winning
personality, and one who had herself well in hand. She had some
masculine ways which she tried rigorously to overcome. She seemed to
know the ropes of college life pretty well; she was sophisticated,
and we were not and, realizing our inexperience, she exercised a
chaperonage over us so tactful that we were not aware of it till years
after. Miss Wilkins was a typical strenuous New England woman, prim and
sensitive, who constituted herself our avowed chaperone, directing,
scolding, and mothering us; making peace between us, and dictating to
us when we much preferred to paddle our own canoes. Though fond of her,
we often teased her, sometimes deliberately doing things to shock her
(how easily she blushed!); yet we always ended penitently with, “but
Miss Wilkins is such a good woman!” And she was, and withal very human
and tolerant of our uncurbed, undisciplined ways. I realize now how
much we owe to hers and Miss Thorndike’s kind and wise supervision.
We rented bones to study the first year. I recall the amused feeling
I had the night I carried home my box of bones: Crossing the park, as
I met passers-by, I thought, “Wouldn’t they open their eyes if they
knew what is in this box!” Here, as always, the incongruity, the hidden
reality, appealed to me.
One day at the Y. W. C. A., when it was too cold to study in my room,
taking Gray’s Anatomy and my rented femur, I went out and sat by the
radiator at our end of the hall; there was but little passing to and
fro and I was soon absorbed in reading Gray and tracing the various
facets and foramina on the huge thigh-bone.
“Young woman, is that a human bone?” a voice called to me severely from
the other end of the long hall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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