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This site is dedicated to Truong Y Khoa Dai Hoc Saigon of the period before April 30, 1975, when everything, even the name of the city, completely changed.This is not an official website of the current Saigon Medical School.
In 1966, after our APM (Premedical year) at the Faculty of Sciences, I was among the first promotion of students who used the new and modern Trung Tam Giao duc Y khoa Hong Bang in Cho lon
I graduated from the Saigon Medical School in December 1972. I practiced as a military physician in the Vietnamese Armed Forces until April 1975. My career included general medicine, obstetrics and gynecology and eventually pediatrics. I trained in pediatrics at the Georgetown University Hospital from 1983 to 1986 after I left the refugees camps in Malaysia and the Philippines and was accepted into the USA in 1982. I have been practicing Pediatrics in the Vietnamese community in Northern Virginia since 1986.Hien V. Ho, MD
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This is my story at the Saigon Medical School (1965-1972)
I went to Medical School.
Hien V. Ho, MD
When I finished high school and passed the French Baccalaureat, it was quite a relief for my family and me. In 1965, military draft was fully enforced and whoever did not pass the high school exam to qualify for college had to be drafted into the armed forces. Draft of college students was deferred until they have completed their education. Medical school lasted 7 years, including one premedical year and six years of medicine. There were only two medical schools in South Vietnam: the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Saigon and the other Medical School at the University of Hue, founded much more recently and less selective.
Most high school graduates vied for a spot in medical school. The profession was well respected because of its doctoral degree, its humanitarian purpose and, at least to some significant degree, its relatively comfortable and stable income. There were also other practical considerations: medical students had their military draft deferred the longest (7 years) and for some, there was a remote hope of outlasting the war. After medical school, even when drafted, a doctor becomes immediately a first lieutenant, much above the rank of warrant officer that a cadet earned at entry level after military academy. Their salary was also much higher than the salary of other officers of the same rank; there was a special bonus for the doctors that made their paycheck equal to a major's salary. Their life was also less endangered by wartime standards, doctors died rather frequently as war casualties, but not at the massive rate of combat officers.
About two thousand candidates applied for the 150 spots at the Saigon Medical School. Female students made up about 20-30% of the total. I was 5th on the admission list, at graduation I had a much lower ranking.
Before 1963, the first step into medical school was a year of PCB (Physique, Chimie , Biology) at the faculty of Sciences, which was open to anyone with a Baccalaureat degree.Afterwards, anentrance examination was a screening device that eliminated about 90% of the high school graduateswho aspired for a career in medicine. The entrance testing covered Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, French or Vietnamese (as primary language) and a foreign language. I still remember the essay that I had to write in French, commenting on a famous saying by a French writer , Francois de Rabelais probably, ''Science without conscience can only ruin the soul'' (Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de lâme). The question in Biology concerned the different enzymes involved at different steps of the digestive process. There was also a quiz asking you about any thing, from mundane subjects like the current price of a bag of rice to test our connection with common daily life of the country, to esoteric topics that was not taught at school (''Who wrote Tao Te Ching''}. The whole test probably was an inspiration from the MCAT test, of which for sure I was not aware at the time.
Foyer Alexandre de Rhodes
During my seven year of medical school, I lived in a hostel for students on Yen Do Street, run by a Jesuit priest, Father Henri Forest.
Foyer Alexandre de Rhodes was named after the French priest who came to Vietnam in 1642 and codified the different existing systems for phonetically transcribing Vietnamese language using the Roman alphabet. He was widely recognized as the father of modern Vietnamese writing system, chu quoc ngu», which replaced chu nom(an adaptation of Chinese character to transcribe Vietnamese vernacular) and ch» Hán (sinitic Vietnamese).
My brother was looking for a place where I could stay, have a good learning environment and without being exposed to bad per influence. The foyer was an ideal place for all that; only it was very difficult to get accepted into it. I have to give credit to my brother for being very patient and meticulous in preparing me for the interview with Father Forest. In my country, we rarely had to go to any face to face interview, application to most selective institutions was based solely on blinded entrance exam, the decision being base solely on one's ranking, or possibly backdoor bribing. My brother asked me to copy all my transcripts from high school, by hand, because we didn't have easy access to a photocopying machine then. On the day of the appointment, he accompanied me to the Foyer. The Father, probably in his forties, talked mostly with my brother who spoke perfect French and was very articulate and persuasive. I got in, thanks to my brother thoughtfulness and to my good grades and recommendation from my high school teachers.
Foyer Alexandre de Rhodes turned out to be one of the most educational, formative and decisive in my whole life. There, I learned to live a life of an adult, to be aware of the broad range of societal issues that were affecting our country, outside the ivory tower of medical school, to think and act freely, yet within the framework of humanism and responsibility. On the logo of the Foyer, a needle pointed to the North, the ultimate aim: Esto Vir, Be a man, Sois homme.
Outsiders often described our Jesuit tradition elitism as a kind of snobbism in a poor country at war. However, as many years have gone by, the influence of our Father Henri Forest on our life in our most formative years have inculcated in each of us the basics of leadership and personal and social responsibility that, so many years later, are still alive in every one of us, the so called AFAR (Anciens du Foyer Alexandre de Rhodes/Alumni of the FAR).
We had an AFAR meting a few years ago here in Fairfax, at a friend's house. Father Forest looked the same to me as he did in my student years, with his large eyeglasses and his silvery hair. Sadly, he has severe Alzheimer disease now and is living in Canada, his native country.
Medical Student.
I had my premed year APM at the Faculty of Sciences (APM= Annee Preparatoire Medecine). We were taught by faculty from the sciences section of the University of Saigon. In the French and Vietnamese system, faculty means a school or a division of the University. The State University of Saigon probably had about 20000 students and its facilities were spread out in different areas of the sprawling city. Around 1965, Thanh Cong Hoa(Republican Citadel), former quarters of the presidential guard under President Ngo Dinh Diem's regime, was converted into the campus for the School of Pharmacy and the Faculty of Letters. The medical school had more luck in that we got a completely new facility in a large campus completely funded by American foreign aid. It was situated on Hong Bang Street in Cholon, the Chinatown equivalent of our city. Multi-storied white and gray buildings enveloped in concrete screen were totally air-conditioned. The architecture probably was ordinary and typical of government buildings built with public money in the United States. Later one of my friends found the same architecture in another hospital in America and it reminded him with nostalgia his own school, which he had not seen again for more than 25 years. However, the school was a far cry from the small, obsolete building that was the Medical School on Tran Quy Cap Street in Saigon and we were very proud of being the first class to use it. As a footnote, it was rumored that because a large cemetery had to be removed for the new medical school to be built, the school would have a very unfortunate future. The following years in the new location would be marred by internal strife among its faculty, hostility between students and faculty, murders of teachers and students. However, it makes more sense now to blame it on the turn of political events rather than to explain it with a hex from exhumed Chinese ghosts. In fact, in a recent conversation with Dr. Nguyen so Dong who had lived in the area even before the medical school was build, he told me that this cemetery story was a myth. A polyclinic had been located at the site before the medical school was built.
On the first day of our first year in the new school, the Dean, Dr Pham Bieu Tam, came to congratulate us in one of the air-conditioned, large classrooms dug below ground level. Dr. Tam was a legend among medical students and the general public as well. He had the reputation of being one of the old style gentlemen who would preserve their academic integrity and not concede to any outside political pressure. It was widespread rumor that years earlier he refused to bend to the pressure from the wife of the powerful brother and advisor of President Ngo Dinh Diem , Mrs. Ngo Dinh Nhu (or her husband?) Mrs Nhu reportedly wanted to have her daughter admitted to medical school even when she had failed the entrance exam. Dr Tam refused to comply and the girl had to go abroad to study medicine in France. As a historical footnote, Mr. Nhu died tragically in a 1963 coup by the military, his daughter later died decapitated in an automobile accident in France. Dr Tam emigrated to the US years after the communist takeover of April 1975 and died in California in 2000.
The premed year (APM) with its basic sciences depressed me with a lot of facts to memorize. The whole curriculum was done in Vietnamese terminology, which was the rule at the Faculty of Sciences. I think I had not been well prepared in high school for courses in chemistry and biochemistry and its laboratory rituals. The whole year course of biology revolved around the study of the frog or the toad. I hated putting a pin through the head of the little creature to kill it. Sometimes, I had the feeling that I was not going to make it. However, there was no choice then. Earlier, I passed the entrance examination to the School of Pharmacy, but I dropped Pharmacy. Its requirement in memorization in botany, chemistry and pharmacology would have been much worse for me.
The first year in Medical School was more interesting though as always there was a lot of fact memorization. We spent three months in the study of bones alone, osteology as it was called, at the famous Institute of Anatomy situated about two kilometers from the new Medical School. We had to understand and remember things like the complex structure of the temporal bone and the many holes at the base of the skull, with the nerves and vessels that go through them. Fortunately, the French who invented most of those absurd requirements in the curriculum also provided us with manuals, which were good but expensive learning aids. Les Feuillets d'Anatomie for example were a collection of about 20 tomes of drawings that gave us a good tri-dimensional view of the most important structures in anatomy. As with the other heavy French anatomy textbooks, I received them from my brothers who went to the same school 13 and 6 years earlier, respectively.
In other disciplines like physiology, embryology, pathology and clinical sciences, our generation was lucky to have American textbooks readily available though the help of the AMA at a very nominal price. Textbooks and visiting professors from American medical schools gave us a fresh outlook at modern, scientific medicine. It was a foretaste of American medicine and an escape from the old, tradition laden French medical system that we copied from our former colonial rulers. This American influence also helped de-emphasize rote learning and put more emphasis on a more comprehensive and integrated curriculum. I was also able to read a wide range of textbooks and journals made available to us at our student hostel by Father Henri Forest who would not spare any effort to enrich our private library with donations from American organizations and with books and laboratory equipments purchased from his trips abroad. Learning the pathophysiologic basis of diseases rather than memorizing a list of symptoms and sign was to me a very captivating approach.
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The legendary Dr Pham Bieu Tam was the first Vietnamese dean of the school after French colonial authorities transferred its administration to the government of the newly independant Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam)in 1955.
Dr. Pham Bieu Tam: a short biography of the first Vietnamese dean of the Saigon Medical School
(Based on the article Mot Chut Rieng Tu by Vo Van Tung, MD in Tap San Y te.( no 12, December 2001)
* Born 12-13-1913, Village of Nam Trung, Canton (Tong) of Su Lo, District of Phu Vang, Province of Thua Thien in a family of Confucian and literary tradition, of South Vietnamese provenance, His grand father had moved to the capital city of Hue to participate in the court of Emperor Tu Duc. His father was a doctor in literature and a bochanh (mandarin in charge of finances) in the province of Thanh hoa.
* Primary School of Dong Ba, Hue.
* Junior High School (Cao Dang Tieu Hoc): Quoc Hoc High School (Hue) and High School of Vinh (Truong Vinh) in the northern part of Central Vietnam
* High school :Truong Buoi, Hanoi.
* 1935 |
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