Marshak, Robert R

English

Kosmopolis

Bellwether Magazine
Volume 1
Number 1 Fall 1981 Article 4
10-1-1981
Message From the Dean
Robert R. Marshak
University of Pennsylvania
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Bellwether Readers 
In making the commitment to publish a quarterly 
newsletter of some quality, I hope to rid myself of a 
long-standing frustration-our seeming inability to 
find an effective and regular means of communicat­
ing the sto.ry of veterinary medicine at the University 
of Pennsylvania to our many constituencies. We are 
pleased to have fair-share representation in Health 
Affairs, and this will continue. but as the name 
suggests, Health Affairs is concerned with the 
University's Academic Health Center in its entirety. 
Of necessity, the space devoted to any one school is 
rather small, but we also think the circulation of 
Health Affairs is too restrictive to satisfy our 
growing needs. 
Our newsletter may never win a prize. but we 
shall endeavor to deliver interesting, accurate 
information on every facet of the school's activities 
in a format that will invite and hold your attention. 
Or. John E. Martin, editor. whom graduates of the 
'50s and early '60s will remember fondly as a 
professor of pharmacology and therapeutics. was 
one of the best teachers in the school. 
In preparation for our centennial celebration in 
1984, Or. Martin is also hard at work on a history of 
the school with particular emphasis on the last fifty 
years. Looking back to the beginning, to 1884, when 
the University admitted its first class of veterinary 
students, Dr. Martin has uncovered data that have a 
particular fascination, as we prepare to occupy the 
new teaching hospital in West Philadelphia. He 
discovered that in 1884, the building that was to 
house the entire School of Veterinary Medicine cost a 
mere $16,900, almost precisely one-thousand times 
less than the cost of the new teaching hospital. In 
that same year, the Trustees' minutes record an 
allocation of $350 to equip the newly-founded 
school. This original facility stood on what is now 
the site of the Medical School Laboratory Building on 
Hamilton Walk, approximately three city blocks 
southeast of the new hospital. 
As between 1884 and now, it is hard to imagine a 
more sharply contrasting physical and intellectual 
environment. Yet, 
through nearly ten 
decades, the school's 
educational philosophy 
and achievements can 
be traced unmistakably 
to those humble begin­
nings, when a few saga­
cious men determined to 
establish a veterinary 
school in a great center 
of humanistic learning and academic medicine. 
In this newsletter we shall often cite the 
achievements of our students and faculty, both 
individually and in the aggregate, but mainly we 
hope to acquaint you with the school's remarkable 
spectrum of activities and to bring to your attention 
those advances and areas of endeavor which are of 
particular interest to alumni and to all the 
constituencies-farmers. horsemen. owners of com­
panion animals-served by veterinary medicine. 
Dr. Robert R. Marshak 
Dean, School of Veterinary Medicine 
Falll981 3 
A Mandate for Man 
No one, of course, has ever been able to fix a 
point in time when our species emerged. 
Although the word "impossible" is an 
anathema to us,/ fear we must admit that that 
search is an impossible one. We are destined 
never to be certain about where we first 
appeared or in what moral or intellectual 
condition. And perhaps that is best. We never 
stop wondering; we never stop looking; and we 
will never stop arguing about it. But we will 
never really know. 
We do know rather more, however, about 
where we are going. We can get a reasonable fix 
on the end of our story if not on the beginning. 
Given our technological capabilities and our 
rate of intellectual growth, in which we are 
said to be able to double our technology every 
five years, a task that once took an estimated 
100,000 years, we have only two ways to go. We 
shall become benevolent or we shall become 
extinct. 
Benevolence, more than any other single 
force in our changing, evolving, turbulent 
condition is concomitant to our own survival­
and a good thing, too. A less sensitive master 
plan might have come up with an altogether 
different construction. I, personally, find an 
endearing imperative in the fact that we 
simply have to learn to be nice to one another 
and to our one and only planet in order to 
survive. It is a little ironic that benevolence 
had to be mandated, but it has been, and all 
avenues of logic proclaim it. It is further 
mandated by logic and time that we take heed 
rather quickly. Our hate-love affair with 
ourselves has brought us to the edge without 
much spare time to do anything but say, "Yes it 
is so, benevolence here we come. •• 
How then shall we record our own 
history? Where are the peaks and valleys from 
those unknown beginnings to that benevolent 
future? I suggest that evil is not a fair measure 
of the true human being who will emerge, 
perhaps, from us. Wars have always been 
counterproductive dips, and since we usually 
forget what they are about, or who started 
them, or why, I propose to you, in the 
innocence of the non-historian, that we do not 
count them stepping stones. Rather, I think, 
the pavement we follow, our path and 
markers, are moral ones, just ones and, above 
all, gentle ones. And I do not play Pollyanna 
here. These are the harsh realities of our 
survival versus our extermination. In this case, 
of course, by reason of suicide. 
It is a fact that the moral and gentle things 
we do outlast the wicked, obscene, bizarre, and 
dangerous. Quite probably, the third oldest 
cultural complex we 1till embrace is pet­
keeping. Think about that. First, certainly, 
came hunting and gathering, a cooperative 
venture. The second olde1t was probably 1tory 
telling. That, too, was cooperative. What was 
the third? In all likelihod the beginning of the 
domestication of the little southern wolf, 
Canis Lupus pallipes, a companion animal. 
That may have been as long as 150 to 250 
centuries ago. And what has come and gone in 
the interim? Slavery, even if it was a moral 
disaster, and cannibalism as a ritual and 
human 80crifice. One of these was a solution to 
Roger Caras, author of this 
Bellwether editorial 
the eternal protein 1hortage and the other got 
rid of a lot of undesirables. All of that has gone 
by the way, however, the companion animal 
ideo has not only lingered on, but has become 
a very important part of our way of life. 
Psychological benefits were acknowledged 
long ago, of course. As a re1ult of studies at this 
University, as well as at others, it now seems 
certain that there are profound physical 
effects as well-things like longevity, our own 
longevity. 
Not long ago I was in Amsterdam with my 
wife, my daughter, and some friends. I was 
moved to give them all a brief history quiz. 
"Who," I asked, "was the prime minister of the 
Netherlands when the Nazis invaded the low 
countries? What was his name?" Puzzled 
looks. "When he was unseated? Who did the 
Nazis put in his place as the Dutch quisling?" 
More puzzled looks. "All right," said I with 
mock disgust, "who was the German general 
who conquered this part of Europe?" No one 
knew. "Just two more questions," I promised. 
"Who was the head of the Gestapo in the 
Netherlands?" When no one seemed to know, I 
protested again with mock disgust, "But these 
were men who had the power of life and death 
over millions of people-and wielded it 
without mercy. These were the movers and 
shakers of their time and they wore shiny belt 
buckles and daggers. O.K., one last question, 
who was the twelve-year old girl who remained 
hidden in a small room here in Amsterdam for 
two years, kept a diary, and then died in a 
concentration camp?" The chorus, of course, 
was immediate. "A nne Frank." 
Does that tell us something about power­
dark, corrupting, unlimited, and evil? I think 
it reflects directly on what we were just talking 
about. It suggests that quiet, benevolent, 
positive human acts and actions, people with 
ideas, goals, and thoughts are the high places 
in our past, present, and future. All the rest of 
it happens down in the valleys, in the cuts, 
hollows and draws, the dank places and the 
dark, the places that real history forgets once 
you add time. 
As might be expected of a race, a species 
coming from the primitive time of skull 
bashing and cannibalism and overall brutish 
behavior toward a mandated, no-alternative 
place of gentle care and benevolence, we peak 
at the good and suffer briefly, and mercifully 
forget the bad. Nature has been kind. Men and 
women cannot remember pain. 
To tie up the loose ends, to package it, as 
they 10y in my world of show and tell, I think 
our purpose in being here today has a great 
deal to do with everything I have been talking 
(continued on page 4) 


Message From the Dean

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Message From the Dean

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