Week 10: A History of Enemas?

I'm currently starting week 14 today, but take this three week belated post as a sign of how gross anatomy is treating all of us. I'll try to catch everything up by the end of this week.

One nice thing about Mayo's curriculum is that while it is intense for six weeks, every six weeks there are two week selectives that are student designed - except for this first one that was mandatory for everyone. In other words, instead of taking 12 classes year long, we have about 2 classes intensely for six weeks and take a breather every six weeks to recuperate for the next bout.

The curriculum for our first selective was designed to get us introduced to clinical research possibilities and how to design and write research proposals. This was not at the top of my interests, but as all of us will need to complete a research project in our third year, it was nevertheless worthwhile to undergo an exercise in which we proposed a certain factor X that was contributory to type II diabetes that we were going to elucidate through our research.

A side project that was also required of us to complete in this selective was research into some random topic of medicine in a historical setting. So as most of the class took this assignment rather lightly (I mean one of my classmates was working on "The History of Medicine: in Star Trek"). I took a equally random note and decided to try to find out who first did what with enemas! For all of you that are in the dark about enemas, maybe my presentation might actually be enlightening. A four day weekend topped our first week "off" that I enjoyed doing absolutely nothing.