Going to the Gradies: Humor in Surgical Training?

July 1st, 1964, finds Dr. Mark Telfair embarking upon a five-year training adventure in general surgery. His story begins with surgical internship at Atlanta’s inner-city Grady Memorial Hospital, and continues during four surgical residency years that follow. Recall the 1960s were an era filled with racial tensions, mixed feelings about the war in Vietnam, and rapidly changing sexual morality; to this add the fact that Dr. Mark Telfair had earlier lived a somewhat sheltered life ... either in Atlanta’s Buckhead, or in the secure environs afforded by the tranquil Emory University campus. He quickly finds himself totally unprepared for life in the real world, one existing on the other side of Atlanta’s tracks. During the storm of training, Mark Telfair learns to find refuge in sanity-saving humor. Meeting under unusual circumstances in an operating room, he also finds the love of his life: an operating room nurse, who shares many humorous details of his training experiences at Grady.