Steeped in Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

biochemistry. It was the golden age of biochemistry: James D. Watson and Francis Crick had just received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their groundbreaking work on the DNA molecule, and this exciting subject seemed to me to be the answer to most of the problems confronting medicine at the time. I have not recanted from this view some forty years later.
    It was not an easy year for me emotionally, with the shadow of my mother’s death hanging heavily over me. My relationship with my father was also difficult. He was angry with me for dropping medicine, and when he remarried some years later, I didn’t get on with his new wife at all.
    Despite all of the family issues, I set about focusing on my studies. I lived in a small flat in Braamfontein that my mother had arranged for me before she died. My tuition fees were paid by the scholarship that I had been granted, and living expenses were covered by the forty rand a month my father gave me. The flat consisted of one room with a small bathroom and an alcove for cooking, which contained a two-ringed hotplate stove. The flat, which was sparsely furnished, was right next to the university in a block called Nelmay Court.
    My budget was tight. The rent was twenty-eight rand per month, and electricity cost one or two rand. This left me with ten rand for food, entertainment, books, and so on. I didn’t have much furniture – a fridge was a luxury I could not afford, so I would buy a half-litre of milk and drink it before it went off. I could buy akilogram of rump steak for twenty cents and vegetables for five cents, to make myself a princely pot of food for twenty-five cents! An old family friend had given me a pressure cooker, and my hot-plate cooked many a stew, which was always tastier on the second day (it became dubious on the third day in summer, and on the fourth day in winter!).
    Eating out was a luxury. A hamburger cost thirty-five cents and a mixed grill around forty cents, but this was over the top. With my home-cooked stew I could feed myself for three days on twenty-five cents! I didn’t go out much, and never caught the bus or went to the movies in my entire university career. I went to my first movie since early childhood only after graduating.
    My lifestyle was incredibly frugal, as there was no one to borrow money from if I ran short. It was a difficult time, and I worked during my holidays, mostly to be able to buy books. I studied, worked and lived a humble life. There was no time to cry about life being tough, and I knew no better, so I just got on with it.
    Being able to afford the books I needed was one of my greatest challenges. I recall agonising over a book that cost ten rand. It was Morrison and Boyd’s Organic Chemistry , and I had to think very carefully before I took the decision to buy it. I was fortunate to become friendly with Harry Fagan, who managed the university bookshop (who, incidentally, had worked in earlier days with Bob Edmonds, the uncle of the girl I subsequently married). Fagan gave me the little bit of help that I needed so badly: he extended credit to me, allowing me to buy the books and pay them off. He was fantastic and never pressurised me.
    Another man who had a huge influence on my life was Jack Allen, a senior member of the anatomy department. I came to know him at the end of my first year, when I worked at the Electron Microscope Unit to earn some extra money. Allen was a remarkable man who had completed a vast amount of work on varicose ulcers, a condition arising when varicose veins cause the flesh tobecome debilitated and septic. He would come into the room and say ‘Allen’s ops are tops!’, and it was indeed widely accepted that his knowledge of clinical anatomy was unsurpassed.
    One particular incident moulded me forever: Allen entered the unit saying that he had to leave shortly to operate on a little girl to remove a glass shard, but that he was going up to the lab just to check his anatomy one more time. Despite