Teachers - Jack Pickleman - 2006, by Arjun Rajagopalan

From MemoryArchive

Who: Jack Pickleman
What: Teacher
When: 1978 - 1981
Where: Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL, USA

Jack Pickleman lived for the effect that he evoked from people around him. His persona was a carefully crafted projection, some of the elements the result of clear intention, a lot more derived from the reacting and adjusting that one has to make in public life to maintain the myth. The shell was a tough, crusty armour of unrelenting demands for placing the head above the heart in all matters, medical or otherwise. To make an impact on him, you had to first contend with this barrier. Begin a defence of any position, with "I feel..." and he would immediately retort, "I have no emotions, I don't care what you feel, tell me about the facts." Almost all his medical opinions were preceded by, "There is a substantial body of evidence that..."

For all this, Jack was not your typical academic who preferred depth to width of knowledge. Jack was an inspired and inspiring teacher, someone who was intensely passionate in his attempts to see and make sense out of the whole landscape rather than just sit under a tree and listen to a brook. All great teachers are flamboyant individuals who believe that the delivery of the bitter pill of knowledge is made easier when sugar coated by a memorable personality and a trade-mark teaching style. There is a fine line too, that cannot be crossed, making flamboyance the end rather than the need to educate. For the time that I knew him, Jack respected this need and never consciously stepped over the boundary.

Short and bald, Jack was a careful and neat dresser, particular about what he wore, dapper but never flashy. A control-freak, long before the word entered popular usage, he could get intensely agitated by events that did not fit his frames of reference. He had peculiar likes and dislikes. His hobby was judging hogs at country fairs, hardly something that you would associate with a city-bred, streetwise surgeon. Certain portions of his daily life were considered sacred. His reserved tennis slots and any night between midnight and five. You had to have a very strong reason to call him, leave alone ask him to come in. He disliked fat people on sight. He considered obesity the result of weak willpower and, by extension, judged this weakness to have soaked into all aspects of the personality of the overweight. He was quick to bracket people, to stereotype them and place them in discrete boxes from which they could rarely emerge.

His public image was a hologram - there in all its apparent three dimensionality but something through which your hand would pass when you got close enough. Very few did, but when it happened, you sensed that for all his professed Cartesian bent of mind, he clearly knew the limits to reasoning. Quite often, he withdrew into mystical recesses that confused those who were familiar only with his popular image. While on rounds on Saturdays, he would pause at patient's bedsides to watch the Road Runner cartoons. To puzzled students, he would pronounce that Wile E Coyote was the only true prophet.

No gifted teacher is without a sense of humour. Jack had it by the barellful. At times during surgery, when the going got tough, he would call for "the dog". A porcelain dog, carefully wrapped in a clear plastic cover and sterilised, would be handed over by the circulating nurse and clipped to the drapes at the head of the patient. Surgery would then proceed under the protecting eye of the mascot. Deep within, Jack knew well that when it came to the human body, outcomes commonly ran counter to what we fervently believed in. This was his way of poking fun at the randomness of life while slyly signalling his sense of humility when up against Nature.

Monday evening "M&Ms" were Jack's courthouse. A merciless, hanging judge, Jack made us all quake at the prospect of having to go up on the dock to defend our transgressions. The sessions would start with him getting up, pulling his lab coat closed and saying, "Could we please hear about this new and hitherto-never-described surgical strategy that 7 West at Hines has devised?" And then the pillorying would commence, all in the interest of education. We knew for sure that, however bitter the discussion, the rancour would never go beyond the doors of the conference hall, yet, the terror we felt remains unparalleled. Even today, 20 years after leaving the perimeters of his baleful eye, I catch myself wondering how I would squeak out from under his scrutiny, whenever I have a complication in practice.

He was uncompromising in his professional integrity. He would never entertain drug detail men or other medical salesmen in his office and had a prominent notice posted outside his office, announcing this to the world. At our Journal Clubs, it was customary to have one of the drug companies supply pizza and soft drinks. Jack always refused to touch any of the food on offer.

A teacher, it is said, affects eternity. Quarter of a century and half a globe separates me from him. I have seen him only once, briefly, in the intervening years. I don't know where Jack is now, in what state of health and physical abilities, or even whether he is still around. Yet, his presence has never left me.