First Day of NMS, Maltz Museum, and Dinner at Mrs. Lerner's House

Today was a very long first day back, and I am going to be sorry I stayed up so late tonight for the rest of this week. But it was a really eye-opening experience and totally worth it.

For all of second year, we have PBL first thing in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, followed by seminar afterward. (This is the opposite of our first year schedule.) Tuesdays we have seminar first, then FCM. This works out well for people who have clinic or physical diagnosis on Tuesdays, because we get out at 11:30 that day instead of 12:00 now. Thursdays are still a day off for most people except for those of us who are taking MS classes or have Thursday clinics.

We had a ton of reading for today about bone genetics and collagen. I had printed out all of the articles before break. So I was unpleasantly surprised to come back today to find that one of the seminar leaders had changed all of the readings at some point while we were gone, and no one had bothered to email us to let us know. I talked to him about it. He said that the articles I read were better ones anyway and I don't have to read the new ones, so that was plenty of consolation.

Our PBL case is really confusing and hard to follow. We weren't really sure about the timeline for a lot of the patient's symptoms or visits. My learning objective is about the effect of anticonvulsants on bone, and it's a really interesting topic. I also went to the lab for a while this afternoon to get some more data and talk to my preceptor about making my poster for the conference next month. I didn't get it all done, so I'm going to have to go back Thursday after class and finish the rest.

This evening, I went to the Maltz Museum. I had never even heard of this museum and knew nothing about it until fairly recently. But there is a new exhibit that just opened there called Deadly Medicine. It is about eugenics during the Nazi era. The exhibit is on loan from the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Most people have probably heard of Dr. Mengele and his infamous medical "experiments" on prisoners. But one of the more shocking parts of the exhibit to me was that thousands of German babies were killed for deformities as minor as a cleft palate. The worst part about it is that the physicians, who were highly educated people and who took an oath to do no harm, were among the leaders in the eugenics movement. Not only did they condone the killing of these children, but they were the ones providing the pseudoscientific justification for doing it.

Today was the opening day for the exhibit. Mrs. Lerner was one of the sponsors responsible for bringing it to Cleveland, and all of us who attended the exhibit opening went to her house for dinner afterward. Most of the other guests were not physicians or medical students, but we had some interesting discussions about the exhibit. For any of you readers who are in Cleveland, the exhibit is well worth seeing and will be open here until January 20th. It will then continue touring other cities around the country. I think it goes to Atlanta, GA next.