The Cluttered Desk 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

The bell in the hallway rang, and the class was officially over, but Dr. Benjamin was still standing in front of the class as some of the guys were starting to put their notes away.

“Don’t get in a big hurry,” Dr. Benjamin said. “We still have a couple of things to cover.”

This was Clinical Pathology class in our second year of veterinary school. Dr. Benjamin was a lady who maintained complete command of the class. She graduated from Colorado State Veterinary School in 1954. That fact alone said she was a superwoman.

For a woman to be accepted into a veterinary school in 1950, she had to excel in every aspect of life. If she wasn’t a straight-A student, she would be wasting her time applying in those years. But she had to have the physical capabilities to satisfy the strict criteria of the admissions committee. There were probably few criteria for the male applicants, but veterinary medicine was a very sexist profession, and few women were allowed to enter.

“For lab tomorrow, we will be doing urinalysis,” Dr. Benjamin said. “Everyone is to bring their own urine sample. There is to be no sharing of samples. So pick up a sample jar from the basket by the door as you leave today.”

A bit of laughter filtered through the classroom after that comment.

“The other thing we need to discuss is the clutter in this classroom after you people leave in the afternoon,” Dr. Benjamin said. “The janitors have been threatening me daily. So before anyone leaves this room, I expect all the litter on the floor to be picked up. Desks are to be arranged in the same orderly manner you found when you entered this classroom a couple of hours ago. That said, there will be no discussion or comments about my desk.”

Dr. Benjamin’s office was across the hall from this classroom. To say her desk was cluttered was a gross understatement. It was covered with books and papers in piles nearly three feet high. She maintained one tiny space in the center of the desk that would accommodate a notepad, but that was the only open flat space in her entire office.

Everyone knew her desk was cluttered because her entire office was the same. There were boxes stacked here and there, books stacked in front of the bookcases. It was so bad that she couldn’t close the door, so everyone knew the status.

Dr. Benjamin gathered her stuff and prepared to depart as everyone stood up to tidy their space.

“Now, don’t forget your urine samples tomorrow,” she said as she paused at the door. “If you don’t have one, you will not get credit for the lab unless you can come up with a sample quickly.”

“That will be fun,” I said to Ben and Chuck. “Packing a urine sample around all morning for the afternoon lab.”

This was in 1972. Our class had eighty-four students. There were eight women in our class. That was almost an unheard-of number. The classes before us would have two or three women, four at the most. There could have been a couple of the women who had a B on their record, but all eight were exceptional students. The profession was changing very slowly.

***

When everyone started into the lab, everyone had their little jar of urine. Dr. Benjamin was waiting at the front of the lab as we got situated at our lab tables. 

With eighty-four students, this was a large laboratory. There were rows of lab tables, with four students in each row. There was space between the tables where you moved between rows to look at other students’ samples or microscope slides.

Dr. Benjamin covered the basics of a urinalysis. The dipstick, the specific gravity, color, turbidity, and other components of the process. What she wanted to spend most of her time on today was obtaining and analyzing the urine sediment. 

Everyone was busy getting their urine sample into the centrifuge so we could start looking at the sediment. Suddenly there was a commotion in the row behind us. Everyone’s attention was diverted to the unrest.

While this was happening, one of the guys emptied a vial of bull semen into one of the women’s urine samples. He had got the vial from the bull farm this morning, and the commotion was a planned diversion. When the deed was done, everyone returned to their work.

The guys behind us shared their row with one of the class’s more popular and self-confident gals. They were all quick to share their microscope slides with each other and were waiting for this gal to get her slide under the microscope.

Once she looked at the slide, her face reddened briefly. Then she stood up and let the guys, giggling now, look at her slide. 

“All right, who’s the culprit?” she asked in a stern voice. “I’m no dummy; I know bovine semen when I see it.”

There were laughs all around, and the plot was explained. That was the end of the stunt.

I don’t think Dr. Benjamin was aware of the goings-on. I am sure that today, things would turn out differently. Possibly, even resulting in an expulsion.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash.