Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

his delightful pen and ink drawings. His book, Adaptive Coloration in Animals, is a
classic. He later worked on crocodiles in Africa and it was Hugh who was
responsible for introducing me to African research many years later, which became
an important phase of my career. Carl Pantin was also influential in that.
Hans Lissman was a fish physiologist, who was the first (after Winifred Frost at
Windermere) to stimulate my interest in serial growth layers when he invited me to
give a seminar to the Part II Zoology course on the topic. This was a field in which I
became involved early in my research career. His major personal achievement in
research was to discover the [electrical sensory system] of fish. I was also fortunate to
attend lectures on statistics by R A Fisher, but they were very difficult to follow,
because he assumed a knowledge that we didn't have. The course began very
simply with us tossing coins as an introduction to probability theory but as the
lectures quickly escalated in difficulty attendance on the course rapidly shrank over
several weeks until there was only a handful of us left, and very few actually
finished the course. I signed up for it three times I believe, but never completed it!
However I was awarded a first in Part I Zoology and later in Part II.
I also read Biochemistry which I quite enjoyed, and the Cambridge department
under Baldwin was a centre of excellence in the subject, but I was never much good
at it. I only managed a second in Part I of the Tripos.
In my first year, as a medical student, Anatomy was an important subject. In
addition to the lectures, we had to put in a great deal of time in the dissecting room
(DR) learning the anatomy of the human body. Like many budding medical students
I had wondered in advance what it would be like to dissect human corpses and
whether one would be robust enough to cope. In the event a few students had initial
problems, though not me, and occasionally one fainted, but we all came to terms
with it quite soon, the women as well if not better than men. We had Gray's
Anatomy of course, but in the detailed dissection we worked from Cunningham's
Anatomy, a textbook in several volumes, with clear illustrations. It took us step by
step through the dissection of each part of the body, starting at a superficial level and
‘peeling off’ layer by layer of muscles, ligaments, blood vessels and nerves – down to
the bones. There was an all-pervading sickly-sweet smell of embalming fluid,
formalin based, but there was really no close similarity between the dried up,
wizened corpses and living human beings, so it all quickly became very matter-offact.
We were paired off in this work and I found myself working with Gareth Owen,
a dark Welshman. He was Organ Scholar at Downing College and occasionally I
would accompany him at lunchtime to King's College, or other College Chapels
where he practiced on the organ. At the other extreme we also spent drinking time
together in the pubs. At that time the Cambridge medical students shared the
dissecting room (DR) with St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School, London,
which had been evacuated to Cambridge. It early became clear to us that the Bart's
students had better teaching in dissection than us - a more practical but adequately
academic approach, rather than the parrot-like learning we were expected to acquire
at Cambridge. The Barts’ philosophy in anatomy was more concerned with function
as well as form.
Gareth and I worked well together; we had to get through a ‘part’ each term in
great detail, and we were examined periodically by the ‘Demonstrators’ who
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