These are real life incidents relating to the Colombo Medical Faculty and a collection of other stories. We hope that reading them puts you in a good mood. Please send us your contributions to the following email address :- comedfaculty@gmail.com
A 'Saying' to remember
'Good judgment' comes from experience.
'Experience' comes from bad judgment.
Sent by Premalatha Balasuriya (Ranasinghe)- 1959 batch
1. New students
had entered the Faculty and it was ragging time. I am relating one incident
that I can recall. The fresher boys had to come in white trousers and during
the interval they had to come to the lawn in front of the Physiology block.
They had to roll up one trouser leg, wear jingle bells on the leg, wear the tie
front to back (I can recall only this much). The so called ‘honourable seniors’
got them to march round and round the lawn saying ‘left, right, left, right’
The Dean – Prof Abeyratne, fondly referred to as ‘pachaya’- announced his
arrival by a small cough and the seniors ran away. The boys continued to march.
He came and asked ‘Are you a pack of lunatics from Angoda?’ No answer came. The
boys continued to march saying ‘left, right, left, right’ for a time until they
got chased away by the Dean. I am sure they enjoyed the fun.
2. There used to
be an annual cricket match- staff vs block students in the 1960s. Sheriff Deen
happened to be the compere. Dr Watson
had just started neurophysiology lectures and it was like Greek to most of us.
When he started to bat, the compere announced ‘Dr Watson is receiving an
afferent input from ???? and he is
sending an efferent discharge’ and so on..
3. When we were
doing Prof C C de Silva’s appointment at LRH, Malkanthi (Dr Channa Wijesinghe’s
wife) was the intern house officer. Prof used to sit at the table and teach
with the students around him. The intern house officers had to be there. He
carried a long knee hammer with which he used to hit anyone missing an answer
to his question. Malkanthi happened to answer a question put to a student. He
said ‘next time you do that, I will put you under the table’ and he did just
that. Whenever a student missed answering a question he used to hit Malkanthi
under the table with the knee hammer. She was shouting ‘Please don’t sir’. She
had to wait there until the end of the class
