From Davidson to Harvard and Back Again

Craig White, M.D.

This is a series of articles about the history of Davidson Family Medicine as we celebrate its 25th anniversary in downtown Davidson.

In The Origins Right Here in Davidson, I wrote about how the seeds of Davidson Family Medicine were planted while growing up just outside town.

My four years at Davidson College came to life through three installments:
Davidson College Humanities Professors
Davidson College Professors I Was Required To Take
The Davidson College Professors I Missed

Now the story takes another turn.   Before even applying to medical school, I had a question to answer: Could I really handle the physical, psychological, and emotional challenges of caring for patients? I figured I had better experience hospital life firsthand, including everything from the physical demands to the unmistakable aromas of hospital life.

During the summer of 1979, while a student at Davidson College, I became a nursing assistant student at Presbyterian Main in Charlotte. The thinking was simple enough - if I actually enjoyed the rigors of lifting and moving immobilized patients, changing bed linens, and dealing with bedpans, then perhaps I could withstand the rigors of medical school. It was not exactly glamorous preparation for a career in medicine, but it was a pretty good way to see whether I was prepared for what lay ahead.

While at Presby Main, we male “orderlies” were kept firmly separated from the female “nursing assistants” by a cadre of formidable senior nurses, complete with their traditional white caps. Among the young women we were so carefully kept apart from was Trisha Schaffer, a recent graduate of East Mecklenburg High School and a Duke University student. Little did I know that this nursing assistant would eventually become my wife.

Trisha graduated from Duke a year ahead of me and headed off to Harvard Medical School. A year later, after graduating from Davidson, I found myself on Harvard’s waiting list. I've always suspected that Trisha may have put in a discreet plea to the admissions office on my behalf, because much to my delight, I soon joined her at Harvard.

Contrary to popular belief, Harvard Medical School was not nestled among the ivy and brick of idyllic Cambridge. It was across the Charles River in Boston, in the decidedly more rough and tumble neighborhood between Roxbury and Brookline. We were thrilled to get our first stethoscopes and otoscopes from Sparr’s Drug Store on Avenue Louis Pasteur; our falafels from Sam’s, the street vendor who kept us fed late at night; and our groceries from Star Market many long blocks away by foot.

My social life was not especially glamorous. I spent my first two years in the spartan confines of Vanderbilt Hall, where Bobby the security guard, knowing my middle name, would yell “Justice!” every time I walked through the door. For two years, my room faced the courtyard, where the bright lights and enthusiastic shouts from tennis matches provided a reliable soundtrack to the night. Then I moved to the alley side, where the 4 a.m. emptying of the Vanderbilt dumpster provided a less welcome wake-up call.

Students from New York City seemed to enjoy having me around, mostly because they found my Southern accent endlessly entertaining. All in all, it was an excellent social education. My Honda Accord even made it through most of my time in medical school, despite it accumulating so many parking tickets that it was finally booted during a snowstorm just before graduation. It had almost escaped.

Although I wouldn’t change much about my medical training at Harvard, the school was hardly a hotbed of enthusiasm for primary care. Only eight of us in my class of 160 ultimately went into family medicine, while many of our classmates gravitated toward the seemingly more prestigious and profitable “ROAD” specialties: radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology, and dermatology.

At the time, Harvard seemed less than interested in this newfangled idea called Family Medicine. Attending physicians would often look quizzically at me when I mentioned my interest in becoming a family physician. In fact, rather than assigning us a physician as an advisor, the school assigned us a medical social worker, who was thoughtful and supportive but perhaps reflected how little emphasis the institution placed on family medicine at the time.

Trisha and Craig White at their Harvard Medical School Graduation

The first two years of medical school were spent in classrooms, absorbing top notch lectures from some of the brightest minds in medicine. Davidson had prepared me well for the academic challenge. Then came the clinical years, when the classroom gave way to the hospital and the real education began. We were grilled on rounds by some of the greatest minds in medicine. Internal medicine and surgery call schedules were every second or third night, which made for an exhausting yet exhilarating schedule.

Some of the clinical rotations, particularly the sub internships, thrust us into responsibilities that seemed remarkable for medical students. At the West Roxbury VA, for example, I remember veterans with tracheostomies jokingly asking me for a cigarette. The next moment, I might be called alone to the emergency room to begin treating a veteran having a heart attack.

There were no family medicine rotations at all. Instead, I had plenty of community pediatrics experience at Cambridge Hospital, where meningitis, pneumonia, and sepsis were common diagnoses in an era before the vaccines that would eventually make many of these illnesses far less common.

Looking back, those clinical years were demanding, sometimes intimidating, and occasionally overwhelming. But they were also the years when medicine stopped being something I was studying and became something I was actually doing. That transformation was perhaps the most important part of my Harvard education.

Trisha and I graduated together in 1986, a year after we were married in Charlotte. Harvard had given us an outstanding medical education and a memorable introduction to Boston. Now it was time to figure out where family medicine would take us.