Honors Convocation 1999

Honoring those who, in a class and a school of great distinction, nevertheless managed to distinguish themselves by their excellence

At the Thursday evening honors convocation held the night before graduation in the main auditorium of the Horace H. Rackham Graduate School, family, friends, colleagues and fellow students gathered to honor those 42 students, mostly graduating seniors, and five members of the faculty who were honored for their exceptional achievements this past year in the Medical School. Named in honor of esteemed members of the faculty over the history of the School and sometimes in honor of the donors of the prizes, the awards highlight scholarly excellence and faculty dedication across many areas.

The honors convocation address was delivered by Roland G. Hiss (BS ’55, MD ’57, Residency ’66), a member of the faculty in internal medicine and medical education for the past 33 years who joked that it was the first time he’d ever given a speech with “no slides, no handouts and no syllabus.” His subject was the long expanse of education that marks a career in medicine, one that begins with learning that is “dependent on the word,” shifts in its second phase to learning dependent on experience, and then returns, in its third phase, to learning based on the word again as the practicing physician relies on continuing medical education for new knowledge. A great believer in experience-based learning, Hiss said that graduate medical education was definitely the “peak” of a physician’s training, and he recounted his own experience of returning alone to “Old Main, which had stood empty and silent for a year,” and going up to the medicine floor, 6E, to the second bed on the left, to the very memorable place where he had learned “what congestive heart failure really was. I had lots of lectures before that time, 44 lectures for 32 straight weeks,” he said, “but that patient experience was what brought it all together.”

Hiss will spend the remainder of his career at Michigan creating a continuing education model that he hopes will meet the needs of physicians at those “teachable moments” when they most need information and can use it most effectively, and that will deal with the “huge and impenetrable” barriers, including geography, attitudes, economics and the delivery of medical care itself that interfere with a physician’s ability to keep learning.