Senior Physiologists' News

“I have not done any research since retiring and indeed for a few years before. I did not tire of research, nor did I run out of ideas; rather, interest in my subject dried up. It and its methodology went out of fashion. All my work was on conscious animals: dogs, sheep, pigs and rats, but mostly on dogs. Working with animals was not glamorous. Working with genes and molecules could be. I have heard it said that the intelligence of scientists, apart from astronomers is, inversely proportional to the size of the object of their investigation. So mathematicians are at the top of the tree. I think that many modern Physiologists are intimidated by chronic surgery and by anti-vivisectionists’ thuggery. To set up an animal lab in retirement would be very difficult. I would be surprised to find more than one chronic animal lab on this island.

“My closest contact with physiology since coming to Ireland has been two years of teaching, filling in for faculty on sabbatical at Queens University, Belfast and seven or eight years running a project for third year students at Trinity College, Dublin. I had small groups repeat the experiments of J.W. Hicks and H.S.  Badeer: Gravity and the Circulation. Am .J. Physiol. 31:725-732, 1992, and others to examine the effect of increasing dead space on respiratory exchange. These were good experiments because they always worked. It is amazing what a poor understanding there is of flow through inverted u-tubes. The bizarre explanations given for the large heart in the giraffe by eminent physiologists are a graphic example of this. The rapidity of onset and the extent of discomfort from small increases in dead space is startling and the way in which long necked birds deal with it, as deal with it they must, is mysterious.

“I gave up teaching in Dublin because the transportation either by private car or by bus became impossible. In the morning by bus it was taking me 2.5 hours for a 60 mile journey.

“I got my Medical degree and an honors degree in Physiology at Oxford. The war was raging, but Oxford and Cambridge were spared being paired with Heidelberg and another ancient German university city.

“In peace time all medical students at Oxford took honors Physiology; it was actually Physiology & Biochemistry, but during the war only 12 were selected. Two of us got first class honors and the rest seconds; there were no two ones and two twos in those days. There had not been a first in the previous five years. I was invited by JA Gunn, the director of the Nuffield Institute, to spend six months in his laboratory to study the isolated spleen before restarting my clinical work. The spleen did not interest me much, but I discovered that no one had studied the isolated sphincter of Oddi. To get a large enough one, I had to go on my bicycle to the slaughter house and dissect out sheep sphincters. My first two papers came from that work.

“The six months interrupted my clinical work at the Middlesex Hospital in central London. Coincidental with my arrival the flying bombs started. Students were to help with emergencies. There were plenty of them. I had to spend one week in three, full time, in the hospital. To start with the V1s were alarming, but soon we acclimatized. The chances of a bomb landing on you were greatest if the engine cut out when it could be only faintly heard, but got less as it approached as they glided for a mile or two before impact. For the first few days, anti-aircraft in the city fired on them. Falling shrapnel was alarming. But then since they were coming from France, the guns were moved to the coast. The V2s were not alarming as they could not be heard coming, but only after they had hit.

“It was a nice summer; the parks at lunch time were full of oblivious people enjoying the sun. In my lodgings, I slept for a while in a Nissan shelter in the garden, but cats and spiders and pieces of rust dropping off the ceiling were an annoyance, so I went back into the house where annoyance was merely the dreadful possibility. There was apprehension, but no terror such as has hit the US. Americans do not understand that.

“The teaching of Physiology at Oxford was, I thought, poor, except for C.G. Douglas, who was an old man but a delightful person who had empathy with the students. There was no dynamism in the department and a good deal of arrogance. The major occupation of the faculty in the laboratories was to castigate students for their presumed ignorance. When the 12 of us, having got our honors results were lined up outside the Department to have our pictures taken, a senior faculty member expressed disgust at the results. There should have been no firsts and several failures. With that he went off. My interest in the gut was probably a reaction since the subject was never mentioned in either the medical or the honors courses. We had a good deal of discussion amongst our selves about particulate fat absorption, for example. Frazer caused a stir by claiming that he could get intestinal absorption of mineral oil from very fine emulsions.

“All medical students and those doing honors, had weekly tutorials. Most tutors would hand their students on to another for specialties in which they were not proficient. Mine never did. I read a paper every week; it had to occupy 50 minutes. The tutor would listen and then now and again would ask insightful questions like ‘what is the longest sympathetic nerve in the body’ or 'What is manna.’ He had jokes filed on cards which he passed around at gatherings of his students. One was expected to laugh at each.

“He worked on the circulatory changes that took place at birth. The experiments usually took place on Saturdays . The students were expected to attend to provide muscle to handle the pregnant sheep. Barcroft, from Cambridge was a collaborator and came over to do the surgery. They had the bright idea that pigs would be better; I thought not. I came from a farming background and knew the strength and belligerence of a pregnant sow. The plan was to do a tracheotomy and a caesarean delivery under local anesthesia .The tracheotomy was to prevent the squealing from disturbing the patients in the nearby Radcliffe infirmary. When the trailer arrived, the sow was at the back suckling nine piglets. That was considered an unfortunate mishap, but not to me; it avoided the danger of broken limbs and other injuries.

“My interest in the gut developed at the Central Middlesex Hospital. We were sent there as a precaution against bombing. It was a strange idea since the hospital was not at a safe distance from bombs, but in a London suburb. It was a county hospital, but from my point of view it was a first rate teaching establishment. The Gastroenterologist there was E. Avery Jones who was outstanding, the doyen of British Gastroenterology and the founder of its journal Gut. The title tells one a great deal about the man. Another outstanding teacher there was Richard Asher. He took us to chronic wards where we saw cases that never would have been admitted to the big teaching hospitals. That hospital was completely devoid of the medical arrogance of the large London teaching hospitals. At the Middlesex, for example, the students and the house officers lined up outside awaiting the arrival of the great man in his Rolls. The most junior house man went forward to open the car door, then the great man and house officers went up in the elevator and the students, five or six them climbed the stairs. There was none of that at Central. It was rumored that the director, Horace Joules, was a Communist. He certainly was a trade unionist. I got a student job there as a pathology autopsy room assistant. My reward was my lunch for the three months that the job lasted. The chief was an extraordinary little German who never took his cloth cap off, who smoked cigarettes, but was convinced that motor cycle exhaust was the cause of lung cancer and numerous other diseases. He was a fanatic about music, but to him only J.S. Bach was a real musician. At every autopsy he was insistent on knowing whether the tongue was rough or smooth! Walter Pagel was his name.

“Teaching at the big teaching hospital, in my view, was not good. Largely I suppose because most of the young staff were off at the 2nd front. Lectures were very rare. After the first two years one could wander where one wanted, to out patients, or ward rounds. Some students seemed to spend all day playing bridge in the common room. We were pitched onto the wards during the first two years and asked, without instruction, to do procedures we knew nothing about. During the flying bomb time we did a lot of this, but we were in teams then and had help. On surgical clerkships one spent a great deal of time holding retractors and doing preoperative skin preps on male patients. I was attached to a surgeon who liked to do cholecystectomies and so spent a lot of my time holding back livers, but seeing nothing else. Certain procedures we had to do and be signed up for, e.g., six smallpox vaccinations, 20 general anesthetics under supervision .I met my wife as I was doing a lumbar puncture and she was the nurse assisting me. I have never done one since. I was good at them.

“I did not want to be a clinician. I suppose the fact that I had gone partially deaf in one ear had something to do with that. I went while in my last clinical year to the first post war International Physiological Congress which was held in Oxford. There I met A.C. Ivy. He had read my Sphincter of Oddi paper. He offered me a position in his department. The fact that my father had been a Physiologist I am sure was a help. My mother died that year after lingering for two years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.. Six months after her death I set off for the New World with £5 sterling in my pocket, all that currency restrictions would allow and a permit exempting me from the British draft. It never crossed my mind that the US authorities would want me in their army. Most European countries will not touch foreigners.

“All in all I found Chicago difficult or at least the area around the University of Illinois. Nothing was marked, no street signs, no bus stops, no mail boxes, etc. One got the impression that they were not used to visitors and did not much want them. To get my shoes mended I had to leave a $20 deposit, to get postage stamps out of a machine one had to put in more than the value of the stamps etc.

“Ivy's was an extraordinary Department, Clinical Science it was called.  He was the head of it, but also vice president of the university and, therefore, was rarely in the Department. Grossman was the second in command whose office was in the department, but he rarely left it except to do dog surgery for someone who asked him. When I got to the Department, I discovered that I was the only other staff member. All the remainder were graduate students .About half were American. Of the remainder there were Finns, Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians and Argentineans. Most of them had medical degrees and all were engaged full time in research. There were a few people there who had come with Ivy from his previous post at Northwestern. These were the research fellows who did not have medical qualification. Dr. Ivy was intolerant of formalities which he thought were academic obstacles, for example, since I was paid as an instructor in the Department, I was only allowed 30% credit for my research work. In other words, I would have to wait another six years after leaving before I could get a PhD, but Ivy would have none of that. My exams were scheduled at the normal intervals. My PhD thesis was accepted and I set off expecting to wait six years for the official graduation; however, the following May I received a letter telling me to present myself at Navy Pier, Chicago, to be awarded my degree. Graduate students without grants at Illinois were required to pay full fees. Ivy got around this by awarding them a dollar or two per annum from Department funds.

“The most difficult teaching I ever did was in Ivy's dept .The Department, Clinical Science, taught one course, Physiology of Symptoms, which was Ivy's darling, but he was often away and Grossman replaced him. When Grossman was away also, I was asked to do the job. I have nightmares still thinking about it. How does one 24-year-old, a month or two out of medical school, prepare a lecture on the physiology of cough, for example, where does one look for information? I was the youngest in the class. The students were returned vets. They were polite; no one hissed, booed, or stamped feet as would have happened in the UK.

“I went to work with KS Kim from Seoul who had preceded me by a few months. We cooperated on bile acid secretion using conscious bile fistula dogs. We were given a technician between us. He was extraordinarily tall, large, well dressed. He favored brown suits and wore a brown trilby hat. He carried an expensive leather attache case. Kim, who's English was poor at this time, was sure that he was a physician as he pretended to be. After a few questions it was evident to me that he was not, but I said nothing. It was obvious also that he was carrying on some sort of practice in the Chicago South Side, where he lived, but he did openly pretend to be a graduate student and ostentatiously filled in the forms each semester. I asked Ivy about him and got an unequivocal reply: ‘he is your technician that is all.’ When I asked Grossman his answer was, ‘he says he is a graduate student. That's all I know.’ I fired him. I was leaving and the money was ending. I was visited in my lab by a very angry young black man from the Physiology Department who had apparently been appointed chair man of a new Department in a new minority Medical school; my technician had been hired pending the completion of his degree. This would have been the young chairman’s first appointment and an unfortunate one for him. He was very grateful..

“Those were times when new medical schools were opening all over the US. I never had any intention of staying permanently in the US, but applying for posts in the UK, where I never had a job there, was not easy. A former tutor of mine when asked by me for a reference wrote one, which I heard about later, to the effect that he knew nothing about me since I left Oxford. He should have, as not many of his pupils became full time Physiologists. Writing references for former colleagues or students can be difficult, especially if they are personal friends. My belief is that one should be honest and tell the applicant what type of a reference you believe you can honestly write and will if they find it acceptable. If your assessment is totally negative it is wise not to write anything nowadays. At that time new departments were recruiting faculty. Recruiters came to Ivy's department from the new UCLA Medical School and from the University of Washington, amongst many other places. I went to Pharmacology in the latter and my colleague, Ralph Sonnenschein went to the new UCLA medical school.

“I was a fish out of water in pharmacology. I do not believe the chairman new what I did. He would introduce me to visitors as ‘Dr. Magee: he works on the liver’ and then leave the lab. At this stage, I did not. I had written my PhD thesis on bile acid secretion and soon went on to other things. The Department was interested mainly in Psychopharmacology, autonomics, and alcohol and I was interested in gastric and pancreatic secretion using dogs. The others used acute cat preparations.

“Once again I found myself lecturing on subjects I knew almost nothing about. As is the custom, the newest on the faculty gets the lectures no one else wants. What did I know about the pharmacology of anti malarials or antihelmithics. At least I knew the life cycle of the plasmodium and the students did not, but of course, unlike the subject matter I got stuck with in Chicago I could easily look the subject up. We had far too many lectures, imagine giving a whole hour to aspirin. Fortunately, as time passed, the lecture time was greatly reduced. The most wretched student was the one who had done a summer job in a hospital and liked to show off his knowledge by stumping the lecturer with some trivial clinical question frequently involving trade names for drugs which pharmacologists did not and do not know. This jigsaw of nomenclatures was and is something I did not understand and still do not. It is an obvious cause for confusion for students and expense for patients. I tried to resolve this when I became chairman of pharmacology at Creighton. In my naivety, I thought I could introduce generic only prescribing to the clinical faculty by producing a generic formulary. I failed and I am sure there has been no progress there since. A common reaction was ‘no God damn pharmacologist is going to tell me how to treat my patients.’ I was at a lecture years ago on eclampsia given by a chairman of OB-GYN. His regime was Phenobarbital for 10 days and then Luminal until delivery. When challenged by a student, the professor was visibly annoyed and simply said, ‘this works.’ At a surgical round the use of intragastric levophed for gastric bleeding was discussed. When a student asked what it was the presenting surgeon had to turn to me for the answer. In this country clinicians seem to go out of their way to avoid generics. Imagine prescribing Vitamin B12 by trade name. In the UK the National Health Service has finally been persuaded that a great deal of money is saved by using generics whenever possible.

“I formed a close association with Henry Harkins, head of surgery in Seattle. He had an active research program for his residents. Any residents or young surgeons, who expressed an interest in the pancreas were sent to me. That is how T.T White and I got together. In the lab at various times we had Elmslie from Australia, Lund and Lerminger from Sweden. John Brown, well known subsequently for Motilin and GIP, had just gotten his PhD from Harper's Department in Newcastle on Tyne with which I had close connections. The first Asian post doc to apply to the Department came to work with me was Hayama from the veterinary school at Chiba University. The others in the department were too apprehensive to have anything to do with him he was such a novelty in that department. Another was a Korean, K. S. Hong, who subsequently became Dean of the Yonsei medical school.

“When in Seattle I applied for and got a Guggenheim Fellowship which took me for a year to the Rowatt Agricultural Research Institute, Aberdeen Scotland. In those days one had to be a US citizen to hold a Guggenheim. The whole family, six of us, was due to travel in a month when I got word that I could not hold the fellowship as an alien of any sort. I thought that the authorities would balk at a special rushed citizenship job for someone that could hardly be called patriotic, but in three weeks, I was a citizen.

“The only work that I could discover on pancreatic secretion in ruminants had been done in Cambridge using a Thomas type fistula. I used a slightly modified version. There seems to have been very little done since. The special allure of the ruminant is that it would seem to have very little need for a pancreas since almost all of its digestion takes place in the rumen, but one has to realize that a considerable fraction of the digesta entering the duodenum are dead and dying ruminal organisms.

          “When I got back to Seattle, the book which I had been writing during the sabbatical, was published and I was promoted to Professor.

“I enjoyed Seattle and my time there, especially my association with surgery was productive, but I thought that I was going nowhere so I accepted the chair of Physiology & Pharmacology at Creighton Medical School in Nebraska. I became aware of this through my membership on an NIH postdoctoral grants committee.

“After the tail end of a summer and a winter in Omaha I regretted leaving Seattle's climate, its scenery and its cultural amenities. Seattlle was a real university town with theatres, music, art, public lectures and classical cinema and public controversy, much of it at the universities. In all of these, Omaha was sadly lacking. It had only one Chinese restaurant, for example, a wretched climate and no scenery. My opposite number at the University of Nebraska used to say that the people of Omaha had to be kind and friendly, which indeed they were, to make amends for a wretched climate and a featureless countryside. Omaha did not feel like a university city in the same way that Seattle did.

"I arrived just as the medical school was expanding. I had to employ more faculty, which in those days was difficult; labs and offices had to be moved more than once. The Western Reserve fad was multi discipline labs. These had been decided upon before I got there and were finally realized after most of the country had abandoned them. My first semester marked the end of another fad, the vertically integrated curriculum. Too much of our time was spent in committees and the clinicians proved to be unreliable. Or, so we thought.

“When I arrived research money was plentiful and we applied for and received approval to start PhD programs in the basic medical sciences. We abandoned the MS as a requirement for the PhD, but a large number opted to take the MS. These were all students anxious to go into medicine but had failed to gain acceptance. Our record was excellent; everyone who got the degree from us ultimately got into medical school somewhere in the US. As funds dried up we had to curtail the graduate programs for a time. I had funds, but G-I research did not attract many students so I spent my money on post docs, mostly from Nagoya. I had a long liaison with Gastroenterology at Nagoya University dating from the International Physiological Congress in Tokyo.

“I went to the Congress. In Tokyo I was met at the airport by Hayama to be told that I was invited to visit the Nagoya department by Dr. Oyama. I protested that there must be an error since I do not know him. The answer was that he knows you.

“As I got off the bullet train in Nagoya I was met on the platform by a line of very neatly dress young men. I gave a seminar on a very hot, wet afternoon and agreed that Dr. Nakamura would come and work for a year with me. He was the first of a series of very diligent, bright young men. Most of my work in Omaha was done with them. The last one was Naruse; he stayed with me the longest. He went into research on his return to Japan. With him we perfected the Thomas cannula technique for pancreatic fistulae in dogs.

“We did a lot of work on interdigestive periodic secretion. Not many are or were interested in this; I suspect because it is tedious. Our animals' secretion peaked at 90 minute intervals, which meant that to be meaningful, experiments had to last for at least three periods (180 minutes). It also means that a lot of conclusions usually based on 10 or 15 minute collections, need to be reexamined. Many experiments which should easily give clear results have not done so, e.g., the action of atropine, because of failure to recognize the fluctuating base line.

“I learned in Seattle that scientists cannot afford to ignore politics. US parities are inclined to become hysterical; I went through three such episodes in my life in the US. I had ignored politics when in Chicago; imagine my alarm when after a year or two, I, a foreigner, and every other employee at the University of Washington, was told that he/she would be dismissed unless a loyalty oath and a communist disclaimer were signed voluntarily. If I signed this, as a foreigner, it would amount to perjury. In answer to an enquiry about citizenship, I was told that made no difference. A lot of good people, especially in universities, during this shameful period were forced out of employment. I did not sign, together with 49 other university employees. These were exciting times as our case went from court to court and eventually to the Supreme Court where the oath was ruled invalid because of ambiguity. This was only a partial victory .We were hoping a ruling against all such oaths in the future. I believe that this was the first successful challenge and I do not believe that any more such oaths were introduced. The Seattle 50 ought to be remembered by a monument at the NSF or at NIH.

“The next period was the Viet Nam era. If I had stayed in Seattle, to be opposed to that war was no great affair, but Nebraska was a different matter, but all at a personal level, anonymous phone calls, etc., but an ominous suggestion which did not materialize was that government research grants should go only to those with acceptable political beliefs. I like to think that it was scientific vigilance that prevented this from becoming government policy. This sort of thing could and maybe is happening now, since it seems that hysteria is again being deliberately and successfully fomented. When the anonymous and suspected phone taps ended, my children were disappointed; they thought they were amusing.

“At Creighton every male student had to join the ROTC. At the time ROTC around the country was being physically attacked. We thought that it should exist at the university for those students who wanted it only. When it was abolished, the commanding officer thanked me personally, as he now had dedicated students only.

“Omaha improved enormously. A good orchestra was established, a good program of visiting performers was started, an opera company was established; there are now dozens of Chinese restaurants, and a few Indian. The city now has a superb zoo. On comparing experiences with others we felt it was an excellent place in which to bring up a family. We have five children. All of the common modern hazards are there, but seem to be easier to avoid in Omaha. The one big deficiency for us was theatre. There was only one when we got there, interested only in musicals. Several others were started, but reverted to musicals. A promising initiative was in the basement of the largest theatre where a program of modern plays was started, but that was ended with a new director. The city college was incorporated into the University of Nebraska and now I am told has a lively performing arts department. So Omaha is progressively becoming a university city.

“As time passed, funds got tighter. The new Creighton Health Sciences Vice President imagined that faculty lines could safely be reduced and teaching loads increased as a good way to increase income. Courses for occupational therapists, respiratory therapists, cardio-therapists, etc., were started. The red line was reached when it was seriously proposed that we start a college of chiropractic medicine. The Orthopedists lead the successful revolt against that. Physiology was reduced to a faculty of four. We ceased taking in any graduate students as we had neither the staff nor money for modern equipment to run an honest program. With a change in Health Sciences administration, money for basic sciences became more plentiful and I was able to employ four new faculty.  My objective was always, if possible to have every major segment of the subject covered by an expert. Neurophysiology, which included special senses, needed two. I was able to fulfill this requirement for the first time in a decade. I have always believed that teaching was our primary responsibility, but the best teachers are likely to be those who are active researchers in their subject. There are many who seek to build a specialist department; my successors in the Department were of this stripe.

“My medical qualification from Oxford was the usual BM, BCh, and, in addition, after a five-year interval and a fee of £5 in those days one got an MA. That made one a senior member of the University. I decided in the early 1970s to try for the senior medical degree, DM. The usual way to get this was by examination, but it could also be awarded on the basis of published work. I was awarded the degree, but it did not advance my career, as far as I could see, by one iota. I could now appear as an equal before my medical colleagues, but be comforted knowing that I was more than equal.

“I have long felt that we teach the subject in far too much detail to the ordinary professional students. This is forced on us in large measure by the National Board exams. It has to do with status. It is human nature of people to stress the importance of their own subject. This means a difficult course and exam. This human behavior is often very evident at PhD orals .The examiners are not only examining the student, but competing with one another not to be seen as ignorant. I always pointed this out to students going into orals. North American students tend to be very uncomfortable with orals. British students, who become accustomed to them as they were part of every major exam, in my day, were less apprehensive and learned the techniques; the same, to an extent, could be said of the examiners. I do not think they often believed me.

The emphasis on detail promotes bad study habits; short-term memory is the goal. I must say it is impressive but it endures, as expected, only until the next multiple choice exam, which often is the next morning. This, I believe, explains why, when I was teaching , the Physiology National Board scores were always the lowest of the basic sciences. Memory is not enough for physiology; memory was enough to do well in courses prior to physiology. Often in physiology tests there are simple numerical questions. In our experience it did not matter how simple, students always did badly. Perhaps in other basic science tests numbers are not used, but I would have thought that in Biochemistry numbers would make an appearance. The greatest piece of educational humbuggery I have ever encountered is the "Behavioral Objectives" fad. Of course they help students to get higher grades. They are told, are they not, what the questions will be. Students complain if they get questions not explicitly stated in the objectives.

"I never sat an objective test in my life. Our exams were all comprehensive finals and included a short oral and a practical. They were always held a week after term. Most sensible students would spend that week at the beach or on the river. That was the advice that tutors gave their students. I took it..

“All of our PhD students were given the opportunity to teach under supervision. After the introduction of student evaluation of teachers I sat in on the lectures to the medical class. That meant that I had experienced the teaching of every member of the staff; as a result, I was able to prevent a few instances of prejudice and gross injustice. All our examinations were scrutinized by a committee. That again was worth while; we uncovered a few ingenious methods of cheating. A guilty student congratulated us, telling us that he had used his scheme all through college and we were the first to catch him. He was dismissed, nevertheless. I always thought it appalling that a career could be ended by a percent or two below the pass mark. We gave make up exams and a summer courses open to anyone, including our own students, but not to graduate students.

“Student evaluations of faculty were conducted by the students  themselves. They set the questions, but the dean’s office did all the clerical work. The completed forms were given to the chairman who was told by the class president to pass them out to the respective faculty personnel. I simply distributed the numerical assessments because quite commonly some of the comments were scurrilous and insulting. I more than once told a class president that they should be able to express disapproval of a teacher politely if they wished attention to be paid to their comments. The reaction once was that the class president stuck the comments on the corridor wall. I told him that many of these were actionable and if they were not removed immediately we would see him in court. It had never occurred to him that faculty have rights also. The comments were away within the hour. I am not opposed to student evaluations, but one has to realize that there are some evaluations that the student is not competent to make, i.e., does the lecturer know his subject, or is he/she up to date. Students do not seem to know this.

“We had a few dealings with lawyers dating mostly from affirmative action days. Some students felt that they were owed a degree; having been admitted to medical school, all of their cases failed. Some of my colleagues seemed to be wary of court cases. Our pass mark was 65%. It was awfully suspicious when minority students got 65 after 65 on and on. My comment that they should give them 85 which was, after all, no more false than 65. We did fail students,  including minorities. I had to account for this to the university president on one occasion. He asked me an amazing question: ‘surely you believe that a bad doctor is better than none?’ A difficult case was a student who was indicted of a felonious theft a few months before graduation. His lawyer refused to bring the case to court until after graduation day even though guilt was a foregone conclusion. Fortunately, this did not involve me and I do not know what the outcome was.

“We had one case of what seemed to be improper dismissal. He was probably our most competent teacher. The case went through various committees and it was eventually settled out of court to the satisfaction of the defendant. Brilliant faculty are commonly awkward, but should be regarded as an asset. I always thought it an asset that I had faculty who were not afraid to challenge me. Sometimes I was persuaded; sometimes not, but either way it was valuable to have had opinions which caused one to think again.

“I did not like administration and left that to two watch dogs, a very competent technician and a series of first class secretaries. If they spotted any irregularity then I, of course, had to deal with it; this enabled me to spend most of my time in my laboratory. I worked in the lab with my dogs and pigs until I retired.

“Many of our PhDs eventually went into medicine. I used to advise all of them that if they wished to stay in academe and prosper it was important to become involved in the politics of the relevant professional society. I was not interested, but could see the progress of those around me who were. I used to ponder from time to time that a course in the business school in management or marketing would be a lot more useful than those ridiculous foreign language exams, which by the way we abolished. To deny a student a PhD because he or she could not read literary French was absolutely preposterous. It is interesting that those in the PhD departments who were multilingual opposed the language requirement. The others, because, I suppose, they had to pass this silly exam themselves, now felt that all should.

“In 1970 I got a Fogarty Fellowship and spent a year with Henri Sarles at INSERM in Marseille. I worked there with two Japanese clinicians mostly on conscious rats examining the pancreatic hypersecretion which followed the chronic diversion of pancreatic juice to the exterior. We found that it was secondary to gastric hypersecretion which invariably occurred. This was published, but I do not think anyone believed it, least of all people in Sarles’ own department who had never considered diverting gastric secretion. Six years later I went on sabbatical to Adelaide, South. Australia. There I worked on interdigestive motility in conscious sheep. Normal sheep did not show it, I felt, because the duodenum is never empty, but if the ruminal contents are diverted, they do. Unfortunately, I was unable to publish this as all my data was lost between Adelaide and Omaha.

“I spent a month in Okazaki, with my former post doc fellow, Naruse, on the way home. The generosity of my former fellows to me and my wife who joined me, was extraordinary, even embarrassing at times.

“I was a chairman at Creighton for 26 years, first of Physiology and Pharmacology and then of Physiology alone. That was a record at Creighton, but it was not plain sailing. A new administration decided that the chairmanship should rotate as it did in other faculties. I and a few other chairmen who had been in office more than three years were asked to resign. Two did, but I refused on the grounds that I was employed without any stated time limit. A few years later, it was decided that nine years was the maximal term in office for chairmen. Once again, I refused to resign on the basis of years in office and survived for 26 years as a result. At this time, another new administrator had the bright idea that since the chairmen of Anatomy and Physiology were in their mid 60s and Biochemistry was without a chairman, all three should be amalgamated as a Department of Biomedical Science under one chairman. I was fortunate in that I never had to work in a department where there was acrimony, although I saw plenty of it in others, but after the amalgamation it did appear.

“My timing as a Physiologist was a bit unfortunate. I was already middle-aged when the great development in data processing came about. I wasted my time going to courses. I got a computer in my office and was given a large book, DOS, which was said to be essential. I gave up. It would have taken me three months to read it and perhaps remember 2% of it. Long after my retirement when the ‘mouse’ appeared, I got another one and taught myself. The timing of the computer age meant that much of my work was published before the advent of computer storage and retrieval. It is depressing to read ‘original’ work today, which one had published in the 1970s without any reference to it. What this means is that work published before 1980 is all but gone; the internet has been an undoubted boon, but is also an iron wall across the past. It was rare even in the past for papers to be read in their entirety, but today I feel that reference lists are simply taken from the internet and read by title only, if even that. This explains the rarity of references prior to 1980.

“I am tempted to give my views on the reviewing of papers, but I feel I have written more than enough, but I feel I must say that there is absolutely no excuse for scurrilous or insulting reviews.  I am sure we have all received them. Since reviewing papers is a tedious and not a very rewarding exercise, the temptation to pass the chore on to a junior surrogate is strong and moreover ferocious criticism is often mistaken as thoroughness, but it is more likely to be ignorance, arrogance, or prejudice.”

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