How I came to be the dizzy doctor of New Orleans.

grew up in an Eastern European ethnic neighborhood in Chicago. I decided to become a physician because, while hospitalized at Cook County Hospital in Chicago for viral pneumonia at age 4 1⁄2 , I was fascinated by what I saw doctors and nurses do. My parents had never gone to school and I didn’t know any doctors, so I waited until I was in first grade to ask my teacher, “Miss French, how do you get to be a doctor?” Her advice to me is paraphrased in these four important lessons: (1) You had better like people, listen and pay attention to what they say, and plan to work long hours. (2) School is an obstacle course. Forget whether you like the teacher or the subject. Get the best grades you can on the exams because if you don’t, you’ll never get to be a doctor. (3) It will take you 30 years to get where you want to be from where you are now. (4) I know you come from a poor family, so you had better get a job and start saving your money, because grade school and high school will be free, but you will have to pay for college and medical school. That summer I got a job selling ice cream bars on the streets of Chicago and made as much as a dollar on many days. Mrs. French had other advice for me also. She told me how I could dramatically reduce the number of years I spent in school and, by following her suggestions, I was able to complete grade school in six years and high school and college in three years each. Then, I was accepted very quickly into the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. After graduating in 1946, I spent my internship at Cook County Hospital. Like all my classmates, I was enrolled in military service because it was wartime. Being too young to serve in the navy or air force, I was a soldier. The war was still raging as I completed my internship, but I was not sent overseas until after the war ended, when shipped out to Japan with the army of occupation. In Japan, we took control of a hospital in Osaka and another in Tokyo, where we could provide care to the entire Far East command. I was sent to Osaka and there