Weillcornellmedicine - Weill Medical College - Cornell University

Weill Cornell’s fall elective begins with two weeks in the emergency department at NewYork-
Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center; then the focus shifts to wilderness medicine. Students
spend a week in the city—attending lectures and taking field trips to the Bronx Zoo and New York
Botanical Garden—before driving five hours north to Camp Dudley, a picturesque collection of log cabins
overlooking Lake Champlain that’s the oldest boys’ camp in America. The students, mostly fourth-years
from medical schools around the country, get an intense immersion—covering such topics as heat exhaustion,
frostbite, dehydration, insect bites, burns, animal attacks, poisonous plants, fractures, dislocations,
and lightning strikes. “You’re thinking outside the box—that’s the most important thing,” says Lemery, an
assistant professor of medicine who attended Dudley as a child. “We’ve become more subspecialized in
medicine and more reliant on technology, but you don’t want to abandon the skills of being a doctor.”
Students participate in practical exercises (known as “scenarios”) by day and have fireside lessons each
evening, on topics from identifying medicinal plants to removing a ring from a swollen finger. (In addition
to their time at Dudley, this year’s group went on a three-night canoe-camping trip and hiked 3,352-foot
Ampersand Mountain in a punishing rainstorm; the spring elective includes a western trip, most recently
to Arizona.) They also learn survival techniques, like navigating with a compass and obtaining potable
water. “Most of the time when we have students from the city and we have a scenario of a patient with a
sprained or broken ankle, we ask, ‘What do you want to do now?’” Gaudio says. “They may say they want
to call in a helicopter to evacuate the patient. But that might be logistically impossible—not having a landing
field, not meriting that kind of resource, not having a cell phone. Sometimes they don’t know what it
takes to rescue someone. An evacuation might take hours or days, and they have to be able to take care of
the patient, keeping him warm, hydrated, nourished. So we give them an appreciation of that.”
Students swap being “doctor of the day,” responsible for leading the team during the scenarios—which
range from the snakebite incident to a trio of ankle injuries (incurred during an attempt to retrieve a
Frisbee) to altitude sickness and hypothermia while climbing Ampersand. (As Santos recalls of Jessica Hu,
To the rescue: Students
Lindsay Cammarata, Cynthia
Santos, and Kelly Grabbe treat
McStay. Below: Professor Jay
Lemery gives students feedback
on their performance.
WINTER 2008/09 27
BETH SAULNIER