In Search of Responsible Medicine

My contacts with animals in childhood were not, I regret to say, demonstrations of precocious altruism. Animals were more likely to find themselves in pieces at the end of a dinner fork or, occasionally, in the sights of one of the shotguns my father bought for me and my three brothers to use as ducks and geese made their long trek south from Canada over the wetlands of' North Dakota. My father had grown up during the Depression on a farm in southern Illinois. Never having known economic security, he devoted his life to assuring it for his family. Unlike his brothers who carried on the family's agrarian tradition at the expense of cattle, my father moved to Chicago to attend tpedicaI school and later to Fargo, North Dakota, to practice internal medicine. In tum, his five children never knew anything other than economic security and developed no interest in the subject whatsoever. But we did learn my parents' concern for fairness and morality, which was buttressed by public attention given in the 1960's to the unfairness of segregation and the war in Vietnam. I attended a liberal arts college in Minnec()ta, majoring in psychology. The residue of B.F. Skinner was still to be seen there in the conditioning chambers