The Eyes Of Fifty Years
By
Leonard Zwelling
I have been married for over 52 years. However, I still maintain contact with people who knew me before I met the BW in 1971.
Last year, in November, I attended the Duke Medical Alumni Weekend to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my graduation from Duke Medical School. Obviously, many of my classmates were there and all of them knew me before Genie did. That reunion was an onrush of emotion and joy. We had made it fifty years. Amazing. We had also lost a number of our classmates. Two of their wives participated in the medallion ceremony with us. That was very meaningful, too.
This November, we were back at Duke for Medical Alumni Weekend, not because either of us were celebrating. Genie’s 50th reunion is in 2025. Rather, the BW is on the Medical Alumni Council which meets at the same time as Duke Medical Alumni Weekend. Thus, we were back. But, this was very different.
Our first few days saw Genie going to meetings and me amusing myself at the Duke Faculty Club and the Duke Golf Course. The Class of 1974 began arriving on Friday. Obviously, we both had many friends in that class including one who was both my roommate in medical school, and the person who introduced be to the BW and was present in the Duke Medical Library when we first met.
Catching up with these people was a bit different. Instead of being cognizant and overwhelmed by the collective celebration of the previous year, I could take a step back and fully appreciate these friends of so many years who we rarely see. In each, I saw them as they were and I saw them as they are. This is a very jolting juxtaposition of looking into the eyes of someone you knew over 50 years ago, but had not seen since then. In so many of these people I saw experience, wisdom, and gratitude that they had had the careers they had had and had the blessing of being Duke medical students. Without the latter, they would never had had those sterling careers.
We also caught up with even more senior people including two Duke deans, one of whom was my chief resident and the other was Genie’s mentor and sponsor in so many ways in her career.
The point of all this is never lost on either of us. We both really appreciate the gifts that were given us in Houston by being faculty members at MD Anderson, but deep in our cores, we are Duke blue and so was every one of the Duke medical alumni in the room.
We were all so different, yet shared the culture of excellence that continues to put Duke medical school on the cutting edge of clinical care, biomedical research, and education.
In one symposium, four deans, including the current one, Mary Klotman, reflected on what differentiates Duke in the world of medical education and research. It is the culture and the discipline and the devotion to medical students like all of us once were. A cancer center can never have such a culture. Cancer centers like MD Anderson have their own cultures, and Anderson’s culture of historical devotion to research-driven patient care and faculty excellence is under attack by the Texas State Legislature, the UT System, and the current leadership of the institution itself.
Duke has had its troubles over the years and its challenges even now, but somehow the culture never slips away. It’s in the eyes of every person who was in the various meeting rooms over this weekend.
Will MD Anderson be able to say the same in the future? I hope I am there to see. I am worried.
