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GENERATIONAL
PERSPECTIVES

EDITOR’S NOTE:

This is the second installment in San Antonio Medicine featuring articles by local doctors or medical students
who come from families with multiple generations of physicians. The stories look at both the knowledge and
experiences passed down from prior generations and the influence that has been passed on to subsequent gen-
erations. If you would like to submit an article about your family please send it to Mike.Thomas@bcms.org
and it may be published in future issues of the magazine.

OUR LITTLE MEDICAL FAMILY

By Jaime Pankowsky, MD

We were three physicians in a small family of four. I said were, My grades
because our son Dan, of blessed memory, was a Hemato-Patholo- went down
gist in Nashville, but he is no more. during my
first and
I cannot speculate how my small family ended up being a med- second
ical family. Our daughter Helen, a San Antonio Psychiatrist, will years and
give her own explanation in a separate article. As for, me, I was this would
born and raised in Mexico. No member of my family recent or eventually
distant was or had been a physician. My parents had migrated to make it dif-
Mexico after World War I, trying to escape the poor economic ficult for
conditions and the increase in virulent antisemitism in both me to ob-
Poland and Germany. tain a resi-
dency in
I studied in Mexico and I liked school. I had little interest in the United
medicine throughout elementary school, although animals and liv- States after
ing beings interested me, but my true love was history. Among the graduation.
history books I read one called “Microbe Hunters” fascinated me.
Great admiration for Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Paul Ehrlich and I was fi-
others was aroused in me by the book, and I felt I would like to nally ac-
join the fight against those evil microbes. Needless to say, in the cepted for residency in Baltimore. By then I was already married
decades of the1930’s, penicillin, antibiotics and all the advances and it was there that my two children were born. They grew up in
we now enjoy were beyond the horizon. Baltimore, Mexico, Houston, Temple and San Antonio. My desire
for them was to get an education so they would not depend on
Medical resources were also limited in Mexico, because at the anybody but themselves for their sustenance and survival. I do not
time the country was just beginning to recover from 10 years of recall encouraging them to be physicians, although at one time or
revolution and bloodshed. another they asked to be allowed to watch operations while I was
in the Operating Room. What their thoughts were was not known
Entering high school, I devoted my energies to biological sci- to me.
ences, and shunned mathematics (big mistake). From then on,
going to medical school was my goal. I entered the Preparatory I know that neither one of them wanted to be a physician ini-
School in Mexico City taking pre-medical courses and finally was tially. In college, they began taking courses unrelated to medicine.
admitted to the Medical School.This was at the end of World War What prompted them to change is still only known to them. How-
II. My parents’ families had been devastated by the Nazis and I ever, I think they both chose well and I am happy for it.
was distracted, in my youthful idealism, from my studies to work
for the survivors in Europe and the creation of the State of Israel.

14 San Antonio Medicine • June 2017