The Good Doctour: a great teacher in our midst.

Forty-eight winters ago I was sitting in Dr. Christopher Drummond’s Saturday morning Renaissance Literature seminar at the University of Alberta. The smokers in the room had their parkas draped over the backs of their seats, poised for quick exits during the brief breaks in our professor’s tightly orchestrated class. On this day, a blistering Alberta snowstorm slammed the city from every angle – normal high winter Edmonton. Inside our warm classroom, a motley crew had assembled. Some of us were graduate English literature students. A half dozen upper-year medical students (only one woman among them, also normal back then) were belatedly picking up a convenient, mandatory Arts and Humanities credit. What some thought was a quick, lean credit turned out to be demanding, voluminous and unrelenting.  Above all, the professor's approach was intense, personal and efficient. 

Our section was a popular alternative to the usual twice-weekly, 2-hour seminar. Professor Drummond’s class was open-enrollment, which meant that it was available to full-time, part-time, continuing education, and to any other students who wanted or needed to sign up. It was a handy, weekly 3-hour meeting, with two 10-minute breaks.

Dr. Drummond came in.  He had little index cards and marker pens.  We wrote our last names on them.  He read each one out loud to check on pronunciation.  He got my name the first time.  Then he collected all the cards, moving about the room slowly, talking the whole while.  He explained that our 45 hours together implied 135 hours of work. He was from Ohio, one of many transplanted American PhDs during the Vietnam War era. Canada was very short of professors back then.  He thought of Edmonton as being the sub-arctic.  The southern shore of Lake Ontario had snow.  Edmonton had deep freeze snow.  As he asked questions and quarried answers, he would hand the card back to the answering student from the stack on the table beside the podium.  We were obliged to bring the cards each week.

When a Great Teacher Comes Along, Stay Alert

We learned pronto that there was no hiding out. His assessment rigor and in-class intensity surrounded us from the first moment. He had an uncanny, cumulative interest in what the last thing we may have said out loud and in the last thing we wrote for him or anywhere public. For example, I was a student newspaper columnist in those days (a whimsical 800 word a week column called Coffee Spoons).  Not infrequently he would toss a comment in my direction just before the second break.  One time he said, "Mr. Schleich, your views on Amchitka need more research, if you care to circle back." To the only female MD student in the class, he commented one time, embarrassing her, "Ms Wendel, your two poems in the student anthology published last week were on a difficult idea and they tell me you understand the value of the short poem of the renaissance to accomplish such a rational argument; very impressive. Have you read any Ivor Winters?"  Ivor who? 

Dr Christopher Drummond remains my all-time favorite university teacher. Now that I know a bit more, objectively, about what good and even great teachers can mean in a life, I point to him often as a superb example of what the literature about “great teacher qualities” sets out with all its benchmarks, descriptors and qualitative narratives.

He assumed the sale. He intended to make certain we were wiser, more knowing, and more confident about his favourite content by the end of our time together.  "I'm franchising this excellent literature to you," he once said. He grabbed and held our surprise and angst, and didn't let go until the last class when he thanked us for sharing time in our lives with him and wished us success in building happiness in our lives.  

It was not a savvy strategy to skip the stack of readings. His syllabus stated exactly that expectation in one quiet line in the first paragraph. Whether we had done the readings with alacrity or not, he would reel us in with relevance, eloquence, context, frameworks, anchors, and more real-world associations than any of us had thought likely in an eclectic "literature of ideas" course. The medical students, I remember, at first felt bushwhacked by the amount of work, being maniacally busy already with a biomedicine curriculum propelling them headlong toward career-determining internships and the unforgiving turnstile of board entrance exams, life in the fast lane of reductionism, biomedicine and monetized health. Not only did he cascade out into the room insight, connectivity and reach, he guided and motivated us through it all with the mischievous patience of the master teacher who knows where s/he wants us to get to for no other reason than to equip us for the wobbles ahead and to share the delights of the journey he had found useful, or at least amusing. And, the special touch of the great teachers of the world, his students knew he intended this for each of us; no credit-seeker left behind.

We knew he would always reflect on what happened in the immediately previous class because he began every time with his famous 300 seconds now about then preface.  In those five minutes he recounted, in précis, what he said and what we had said. If there had been a test in the previous meeting, he'd summarize the outcome. No one was safe from being found out. No one could not not participate.  We didn't see him taking notes or recording anything; so we were dumbfounded by his recall.

Whether deliberately structured or intuitive or both, he had, as I have mentioned, intentions for every seminar. His style was sharp, timed, careful and caring. More often than not, many of our other professors, by way of comparison, were random and picaresque in their musings, and in how they shaped the continuum of their seminars or lectures. We were, by and large, not on our own with whatever form and content came our way.  Rather, Dr. Drummond wanted connection.  He was as eclectic and purposeful as they come, and like a benevolent parent, was attaching us to his consciousness but to do with as we pleased. I wanted to get inside his head to look out through his eyes, to see what he saw out there, from in there. His profound, earned knowledge was coupled with his clear delight in being a teacher. Years later he told me, "Dr. Schleich, having fun is the best revenge, don't you know?"

Those of us who were professor apprentices paid attention to all our taskmasters, whatever their style, of course, and we quickly devised game plans. We knew how to to vie for their attention and favor in order to make it through the PhD and post-doc gauntlet. After all, they had their PhDs done, and had enviable jobs which paid them to read and write about their beloved interests. A good life, that. 

All of this was happening during that long-ago era when coming-of-age baby boomers were in high-octane competition with each other. It was the beginning of a brand new trend when tenure-track jobs started to disappear as a consequence of shifting demographics, spiking higher-education costs, compromised funding units and quantified prep time in collective bargaining.

Those 15 Saturdays with Dr. Drummond stand out all these years later as a time of drift, shift and transformation for me, and for many of my classmaters. We became more thoughtful, more reflective, more open, and less worried.

Signs of Great Teaching

A great teacher will not shrink from engaging students in all the time available. Great teachers know that the biggest expenditure in the teaching transaction is time spent, by teacher and the learner. S/he will reward students for being curious. S/he will acknowledge progress and challenge lapses. Dr. Drummond always followed his 300 seconds now about then by excavating deeply the material of the text or readings of that week, using facts as his starting point, not an end-point. His technique was to drop provocative statements into the dialogue, encouraging us to mine more deeply into the complexity of the work; essentially, to see it from many angles. To follow the veins. To yearn for the mother lode.

He warned us against academics who made a business out of their preferences if those preferences didn't continue to excite them. His exams and assignments did the same, forcing us – if we wanted to get an A – to predict what would happen next with a particular idea or concept or insight. He put us in charge of such explorations, dive-bombing any daydreamer at any moment with, “… and, Mr [student’s last name … for he knew our names by heart within two or three meetings] does the rational form of Ben Johnson’s work here support the idea that the short poem of the Renaissance was the basis of later realism of the novels of Nash and Sterne?” He would pause. "And, if you think on that, Mr. _____, you may conclude, yes." Uh…. my notes from those seminars are loaded with potential MA and PhD thesis topics like that one. Who knew?

Invariably, after numerous, all-seminar-long slices into our comfort zones, he would end his class with, “So, what is worth talking about for 300 seconds next Saturday? What is worth keeping from today?” He would let us leave just as soon as one brave person proffered any kind of encapsulating effort; the last word, as it were. One brave answer was enough to release us all back into the long winter outside. One student brought up Kuhn and the structure of scientific revolutions. We then dispersed.  However, many of us knew that the elephant in the room that day had stirred and we would hear about it the next Saturday in the 300 seconds. What had happened during that class and had nipped closure in this instance, went something like this:

The Good “Doctour”

We had been discussing the power of character in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, an important idea for an era when ideal Petrarchan beatific verse was at odds with the rascally mundane French fabliaux. Our professor was trying to get us to see the modern era writ large centuries before it took hold in the market. That day Dr. Drummond had focused for a time on the famous Chaucer character, the “Doctour of Physik”, initially to the delight of the MD students who were in for the count, now that the course had passed the 3-week drop date and the half way point was in sight.

The good “Doctour” shows up in only a few lines of the famous prologue. However, The Doctour of Physik, in a very short space, impressively cites the names of a dozen famous Greek, Arabian, and contemporary physicians. One gets the impression, Dr. Drummond had suggested, that the good doctor, representing the status quo of the medical profession at the time, is a confident, proud fellow, but that he is also a businessman, given his knowledge and his appearance and dress. Dr. Drummond had gone on to explain that this fictional character was probably modeled after John of Burgundy, one of the most prominent physicians of the era who believed in the unity of disease, and that he seemed to be Chaucer’s exponent of medieval medical science, indeed of science generally. Our professor, though, citing critic W. Curry, speculated that perhaps the “Doctour” was altogether too boastful of his knowledge. Perhaps what he claimed to know was neither broad nor accurate.

I noticed a couple of the MD students, roused from their reveries in this time before laptops, opened both eyes a little wider, calculating the odds on whether their required Arts and Humanities elective professor might choose one of them at any moment to respond to some macro question about an ancient physician, to test not only attentiveness to the topic, but its relevance to their lives as future allopathic physicians, and to the world of their patients, and the industry serving them. He didn’t choose anyone, for the moment. Instead, he went on, citing Walter Curry:

For the good ‘Doctour’ I suspect talks too much. He is exceedingly, though perhaps not abnormally, well pleased with himself and with his profession, and seems determined that the Canterbury Pilgrims shall be properly impressed with himself and with his profession, and seems determined by his success in the recent pestilences… that he discourses rather ostentatiously upon the occult philosophy of medicine.                                      (Curry, 1960, p.68)

There followed an unusual, wonderful, side-bar but strategic exegesis spanning centuries (I have my class notes from that day to remind me of the detail) in which Dr. Drummond spoke from his own notes (he was clearly prepared for this challenge to the MD students in the class), citing examples from random works across 3 centuries of the depiction of other mainstream, status quo “physicians” [Tobias Smollett’s (1721-1771) egocentric Dr. Mackshane in The Adventures of Roderick Random; Hawthorne’s Dr Rappaccini, in the short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter”(1846); Melville’s Fleet Surgeon Cadwallader Cuticle, in The World in a Man-of-War (1850); Anthony Trollope’s Dr. Thorne (1858); Tertius Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871); and finally, Dr. Cottard in Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (1927)].

“Now, wouldn’t that make an exemplary and useful Master’s thesis or even a PhD dissertation topic – ‘The Depiction of Medical Doctors in English Literature?’” our professor announced. One MD student confidently declared that their forebears deserved the acrimony of the authors of the time, relieved that he had spoken and probably wouldn't be called on further. “After all,” I see in my notes that he had insisted, “they did not have the benefit of modern science to assure safety and effectiveness.” “Indeed,” Dr. Drummond countered, “but to hear their protestations about the medical science of the time, your insistence that they deserve the acrimony might be disputed, don’t you think?” He quickly added before he could respond, “Would what you consider acrimony be any less sincere or valid then, as now?”

The subtlety of the nuance did not wash over him or us fast enough, although I do remember suggesting myself that contemporary science, “surely, is more advanced,” to which Dr. Drummond replied instantly, “Without doubt; however, the point in question is the self-surety of the person arguing for that superior position of contemporary science, for surely [he repeated my word deliberately; he was like that], you cannot deny such assurance to anyone believing it so, from any period. Half the medical doctors in our country are foolish to settle for the finality of a diagnosis or a mechanism of action, given the sheer mystery of life and the ancient idea of the unity of disease. As a case in point, the very physicians who foolishly prescribed immunoprin which caused thousands of tragic cases of phocomelia less than a decade ago were safely surrounded by exactly that superior position of contemporary science, don't you think?"  The MD students were all breathing through their mouths by then.

The parry-thrust of the next quarter-hour was energetic, but it did not resolve the question. In fact, I don’t think any of us really understood the question. As with every Saturday at noon, the class ended as it always did with our professor asking us, “So, what is worth keeping from today?” No one spoke up. Dr. Drummond rescued us from the uneasy silence. He said, “We might have had the courage among our cohort today to explore, in light of the rich, allusive literature on it, the notion that modern contemporary medicine can benefit from reflection on the metaphor of doctors as plumbers of the human body and to frown at the hegemony of science as a broad guarantor of truth and safety.”

The following Saturday morning our professor deviated from his normal pattern.  He began the class with an apology. I wrote down what he said and rest my case about Dr. Drummond's being a very great teacher.

I have learned from the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine through my Dean that three men and one woman from among the medical students in our class were offended by certain of my remarks in our last meeting, most specifically related to the physician as character in literature and about the vulnerability of medical science, for which unintended, but experienced offense I apologize. Today, in addition, I withdraw from potential conversation my reference to the role of plumbing as a metaphor in modern western medicine and substitute instead, the notion of reductionism, consistent as it is with what science considers the best of all possible worlds. As well, I wish to withdraw another assertion from our last meeting and to substitute this, that half the medical doctors in our country are not foolish.