On the role of veterans in the development of neurology in the United States: A personal reflection
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"Don't go into neurology. You'll never make a living unless you do psychiatry." This was the almost universal comment of fellow students and faculty at Cornell University Medical College in New York, which I attended from 1948 to 1952. And yet Cornell then had more neurology than most schools have today. The basic sciences were strongly oriented in this direction; the dean was a neuroanatomist. Even more intense was the clinical exposure under Harold G. Wolff, Professor of Medicine (Neurology). In the second year there was an obligatory course in neurologic diagnosis under his direction, distinct from physical diagnosis. A 54-page typed neurologic examination had to be carried out, resulting in a 20-page handwritten report that included all negatives tested. For example, corrected and uncorrected visual acuity, color vision, and mapped-out visual fields had to be performed to assess that area. The examination was organized by body parts-the "end organs," and brainstem functions of midbrain and anterior, middle, and posterior hind brain (not "cranial nerves") were part of the head functions. Throughout my career I have regularly provided this examination to students, residents, and staff, not with a requirement for its use (this approach never caught on outside the Cornell axis), but rather as an example of what should be tested and why.
In the third year there was an obligatory clerkship in neurology, which I took at the Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital in the Bronx, where Wolff was Director of Training. Most of my spare time in that whole year, though, was spent in an intensive elective in functional neuroanatomy under Louis Hausman.1,2 This included building his 4:1 scale model of the brain, which I still have intact in my office. Structures were color coded according to function and phylogeny and provided a three-dimensional view of the CNS …
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