But I loved the internship. I still remember the first time I presented a patient to Robert Petersdorf, who was one of the real princes of American medicine. I won't say prince, I'd say king. He was magnificent. I think he was trained at Yale and moved out to Seattle. I presented a patient to him on rounds, and I said, 'This patient has a temperature,' which is what my mother always taught me to say. He said, 'Fischbach, everyone has a temperature. Did he have a fever?' That was his expertise, it was infections and fever.

I was interviewed by a giant in the field named Wade Marshall, who was also a very strange man. He worked on the visual system, the visual cortex. All through the interview he was bent over and had something in his hand. I didn't know what it was. But at the end when I stood up, I saw what it was. It was a pistol. It was a gun he was fiddling around with it. That was Wade. Never said a word about it, never said that I was accepted or not. Never thanked me for traveling across the country for the interview. But that was the end, until I heard from my very close friend there, Phil Nelson.

But Ruth and I decided that's what we would do, we would go to the NIH. I had to cancel my subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine, which was a painful thing to do. But after a year at the NIH, I realized I was not going to be reading that journal anymore. It was such a wonderful time at the NIH in research. We traveled home to Ruth's parents' house in Purdys, New York, a hamlet of North Salem, where my parents and friends had gathered.