about as a natural course of
events. There were many things about the college and clinic rooms that
were, to me, gruesome and repulsive. The dissecting-room, with its stench
and debris from dead bodies, was the crucial test for me. I wonder now
that I stayed with it as long as I did.

For my dissecting partner I had an uncouth cow-puncher from southern
Texas. There were in the college a number of these broad-hatted and rather
illiterate fellows from the southwest trying to get themselves
metamorphosed into doctors. (I would often feel for their prospective
patients.) This man who assisted me on the "stiff," as they call the
dissecting material, did the cutting and I looked up the points of
anatomy. I preferred to do the literary rather than the sanguinary part of
the work. One evening--we did this work at night--we were to dissect and
expose all the muscles of the head, so as to make them look as nearly as
possible like the colored plates in the anatomy. We were expected to learn
the names of all these structures. The memorizing of these terms was no
small task, for I remember that one little muscle even bore this
outlandish name: _levator labii superioris alaquae nasi_. Anglicized,
this would mean that the function of the muscle was to raise the upper lip
and dilate the nostril. My companion said that he "didn't see no sense in
being so durned scientific." Accordingly he went to work and cut all the
flesh off the head and stacked it up on the slab. When the demonstrator of
anatomy came by to test our knowledge and to see our work, he asked: "What
have you here?" My friend very promptly answered: "A pile of lean meat."
This student went by the not very euphonious name of "Lean Meat" from that
date.

A trick of the students was to place fingers and toes in pockets of
unsuspecting visitors to the dissecting-room. There was no end to these
ghoulish acts. A student while in a hilarious mood one night did a
decapitating operation on one of the bodies. His loot was the head of an
old man with patriarchal beard and he carried it around from one place of
debauchery to another, exhibiting it to gaping crowds of a rather
unenviable class of citizenship.

I mention these things merely that the reader may imagine the morbid
effect they might have upon one of my temperament. Being a freshman, I
was to get in the way of lectures only anatomy, physiology, microscopy and
osteology. This interpreted meant body, bugs, and bones. But I