TWELVE
Oversight and Entitlement
“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a
long time to come.”
—President Lyndon B. Johnson upon
signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964One of the great daily challenges every medical student faces is hunting
for a quiet corner of the world to hunker down and study like a madman.
My solution as a first-year student had been to bypass the library and
make a quest for an abandoned hallway in one of the older buildings on
the historic University of Kansas medical campus in Kansas City. The
oldest medical school west of the Mississippi River, KU has been perched
atop a hill overlooking the railyards and Kansas River below, and nestled
up against State Line Road for over a century. The redbrick buildings are a
mishmash of clinical, research, administrative, and inpatient wards
bearing the names of the East Coast pioneering physicians who forsook
prestige in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and made their way to the
cattle town at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers.
My favorite haunt has become the Eaton Building, whose upper stories
lie dormant, and the speckled, worn marble floors hint at a past life of a
clinical ward or hospital wing. Although there is no sign that says, “Do
Not Enter,” I’m not entirely sure I’m welcome in this abandoned building,
but it’s quiet and I have cobbled together a decent desk and chair, and
after a few weeks it’s starting to feel like it’s my space.
Every night I come to Eaton, and am happy that my spot remains my
little sacred study hollow. I like the smell of this oversized room, a faint