Writers 
I know u enjoyed the first part of my story. Loyola College had a big influence on me. Let me not bore you more. Let's continue
There was another reason why I chose Loyola College, in addition to its good pre-med record and the distance from home. It has a well-known English department. I don't mean this to sound like flattery, because everybody knows it is true. When I mentioned this reason to my cousin, Dr. Bob Mathews, he laughed at me and said I had better leave that English alone and get in some extra science. “Son,” he said, “all the writing you will have to do if you are a good doctor is filling out prescriptions and signing your income tax return.” I know that my cousin sort of laughs, too, at Uncle Bob, his father, in a friendly way and kids him for reading so much and writing a lot of articles, some of them not straight-through professional, but just for the layman.
I asked my uncle about Cousin Bob's point of view, and about Cousin Bob. “That's what you can expect from a surgeon. A surgeon is like a car mechanic. He just goes into the machine and patches it up. Except for what is wrong with the mechanism, every patient looks alike to him. That may be all right for a surgeon, but you plan to be a general practitioner. I'm one myself, and I wouldn't be anything else. It's the king of medicine that has the human quality in the fullest way.”
My father says, too, that in general practice human nature plays a big part. You have to understand the patient all the way through, not just the patient as a machine with a broken part. He says that you have to know who the driver of the machine is, and when he says that, he touches his forehead. “Lots of times it is bad driving that busts the axle, no fault in the steel.”
My father agrees with my uncle and says that literature is one way of studying human nature—and a good way. But he winked at me, then, and said, “But don't forget poker. That's a pretty good way, too. Why do you think I strip all these lawyers around here in my biweekly game? Hell, they're being so logical about everything, and I'm just looking at their faces for symptoms.” My father kids a lot, but he is supposed to be one of the best poker players in Santa Barbara, as well as one of the best doctors.
To sum up, I had to know that Loyola College is a good place for pre-med work, that it is a good place for me to try to be independent, and that it is a good place for me to study literature for the purpose I have in mind (though I mean to study it, too, because I like it, and a doctor needs some sort of relaxation, such as my father's racing and occasional poker).
