Chapter 04: Farming or Medicine?
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. Goepfert explains that his father, Pablo Goepfert, was a surgeon and had a strong influence on his choice of career. Nevertheless, Dr. Goepfert recalls how much he enjoyed working on his uncle’s farm during the summer, helping with farming, taking apart engines, driving a tractor at age nine and then a track at twelve. Though he enjoyed biology, geometry, and algebra in school, he thought of farming as an alternative career. He ends this chapter with a funny anecdote about taking his medical school admissions test.
Identifier
GeopfertH_01_20120827_C04
Publication Date
8-27-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Helmuth Goepfert, MD, Oral History Interview, August 27, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Personal Background; Personal Background; Funny Stories; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Professional Path
Transcript
So, do you mind if we kind of take a few steps back? First of all, just for the record, where were you born and when?
Helmuth Goepfert, MD:
Santiago, Chile, September 13, 1936.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And you were raised in Chile, right?
Helmuth Goepfert, MD:
I went to all schooling and medical school in Santiago, Chile. My father was a general surgeon who basically participated in my training. This was during the residency that I did for two years in a city that’s called Valdivia, where the big earthquake was in 1960. I basically moved down there after I graduated from medical school. In Chile in those days, we didn’t get our diploma until after we had done an internship, so we didn’t have college. From high school you went directly into the career sort of schooling.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So it was a more European-style system?
Helmuth Goepfert, MD:
The European style, which was seven years of medical school followed by a year of internship, which was basically a mixed surgical internship.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, your father’s name?
Helmuth Goepfert, MD:
Juan Pablo Goepfert.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. And did you decide to go into medicine because of his career? How much did that influence you?
Helmuth Goepfert, MD:
Probably. This was an interesting choice. At home you had to take—yes, you obtained all your records from your high school. That was submitted to the university. But then you had to take an added exam. On this exam that was sort of unspecific as far as any school itself was concerned, you got sort of tiers—the result was given in tiers of scores. And of course, for medical school you had to achieve a pretty high score to get in. The positions available, for example, at that particular university that I went to there were 180 and there were about 600 applicants, so it was tough. Then the next tier was sort of all the schools of engineering and thereof. I don’t like math, I don’t like all of that, but one of the things that I really like because I grew up working summers on the farm was to go into farming and sort of the agriculture side of it. So, one of my uncles was a farmer, and from age nine on I used to go and spend the summer working on the farm. It was harvest time. I spent three months there, whatever it was in the south of Chile, and learned a lot.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What were the crops that were grown?
Helmuth Goepfert, MD:
Corn, predominantly. We had some cows for milk, and that was fundamentally the crops that were grown. So, as I say, that was interesting and was— I learned a lot from my uncle. He was a character.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What kinds of things did you learn from him? He obviously made a huge impression.
Helmuth Goepfert, MD:
I mean, just common-sense things—how to use a gun. I’ve never used a gun since, but I went hunting. I knew how to take apart an engine and put it back together. I worked the tractor. Yes, I was nine years old and was driving a tractor. I was driving a truck at age twelve. I learned those things which were sort of practical and common sense. There was no electricity where we were back in the early days out there, so there was a wind charger that charged the battery, and basically at night you had the petroleum lamps and stuff like that. There was no refrigerator, so it was the cooling—you know—that cooling system in which you put a cloth over something and let the wind sort of cool it down. As I say, I learned how to carry sacks, and I learned how to drive the harvester, all those things I learned on the farm. This was a fun time. Then in school itself, I liked biology. I liked everything that was sort of related to the human body, but I loved geometry, algebra, math, and so forth. I loved that too and had a very good teacher. There were these three choices. I happened to fall into the category that I could expect to apply, but nevertheless you still have to give an additional exam at the medical school—an admission exam, aside of the one that you got before. So once that was accomplished and I found out— I had already taken the exam and decided, okay, I going south to work with my uncle. I told my dad, “Would you mind looking what qualifications I got, because it won’t be available for another two weeks?” “Sure,” he said, “I’ll take care of it.” So, I get a letter about two weeks later. He said, “It was a little difficult for me to find because I kept looking at it every day and I didn’t find you until I looked higher up. You were number three.” (laughs) So that was that story. So I went through medical school in Santiago. The medical school burned down in 1947, so these were several buildings where the basic sciences took place. Your first three years you weren’t a basic science, so once I finished med school and my internship, I decided to go work with my dad and to do my residency at the same time in that town. As it was set, you did your residency, and in the afternoon, you could do something else to earn a living, because the residency itself didn’t pay much, so I earned my living as being an assistant to my dad in surgery, which I already had done before. I mean, I was twenty-one years old when I was helping my dad in the operating room as a scrub tech, and I did my first appendectomy when I was twenty-one. So, as I say, I loved surgery, and I loved all that. My dad was a very good teacher. In 1962-63, I applied for a fellowship at UCLA. There was an exchange program between UCLA and one of the universities in Santiago. It so happened that my father-in-law was a professor of medicine at that university and facilitated my application in the sense of moving it forward. The day Kennedy was assassinated I obtained a notification that I would be accepted to this fellowship. So, my then-wife Monica [Goepfert] and I came to the states, and both of our children were born here—Paul [Goepfert] in Los Angeles and Susan [Goepfert Willingham] here at Methodist. Basically in ’68 we returned back to Chile and I started in Santiago trying to open a private practice and working at the cancer institute—Instituto Nacional de Radium—which basically was a barn. That’s what it was.
Recommended Citation
Goepfert, Helmuth MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 04: Farming or Medicine?" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1003.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1003
Conditions Governing Access
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