(Republished with permission from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This article originally ran in the Education section on Sunday, January 22, 2006)
By Kavita Kumar
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
After a monotonous, hour-long lecture looking at photographs of brains with Alzheimer’s disease and slides of spinal chords, an auditorium of second-year medical students at Washington University seemed eager to escape. But they had one last lesson in the class on neurological diseases.
Dr. Arie Perry walked to the front of the room, picked up a guitar, and strapped it over his white doctor’s coat.
“OK guys, I hope you’re in a singing mood,” he said in a soft-spoken voice. “If not, hopefully you’ll be in a listening mood.”
Replete with vibrato, he began: “Parkinson’s disease, a common movement disorder, with synuclein-positive Lewy bodies …”
As he sang, many students followed along, reading the words in their binders. Peering above laptops, some smiled and giggled; others looked curiously at their professor.
Sung to the tune of the classical, Neapolitan song “Torna a Surriento,” Perry’s song melodically named many symptoms of the disease such as “shuffling gait and resting tremor” and “Bradykinesia and rigidity, along with postural instability.”
He received loud applause when he finished. “That’s a nice romantic one,” he laughed.
The ditty won’t make the Billboard Hot 100, but Perry hopes this and the other 15 songs in his repertoire are a fun and useful tool for medical students to remember facts about diseases. And in the world of stressed-out medical students, fun is a key ingredient.
Perry, a medical researcher, has been teaching at Washington University for more than seven years – and has been using his songs to entertain students even longer.
It all started when he was a second-year pathology resident in Dallas. One day, the attending physician said the residents needed to make their presentations more entertaining. So the next week, after presenting a case about schwannoma, Perry pulled out a guitar and debuted his “schwannoma song.”
His musical training includes a few years of folk guitar, a couple of years as the lead singer in a high school rock band, and 20 years of singing choral and classical music. Currently, he is the assistant principal in the tenor section of “American Kantorei,” a group that primarily performs the music of J. S. Bach.
For his medical songs, he usually puts his own lyrics to well known – or formerly well known – tunes.
Several students said they don’t know most of the songs, which include those by classical composers as well as Dan Fogelberg (“Longer”), John Denver (“Annie’s Song”), and The Beatles (“Blackbird”).
Perry explains on the course Web site that his “formative years in pop music were mainly in the ’70s and ’80s.”
He acknowledges that the longer he performs these songs, the more he runs the risk of becoming outdated. “They get younger every year,” he said of the students.
Medical student Kari Wanat had looked forward to Perry’s class since she heard about his songs during her first year.
Over the years, he has heard a few complaints from students who thought his songs trivialized the suffering of patients, but he said that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Perry has shared his handiwork with colleagues at other universities. And he is toying with making a CD – a more professional recording.
While the songs may be fun for the students, Perry takes his class performances seriously. He tries not to eat a few hours before he sings, especially on days when he tackles more vocally-challenging songs. And he likes to warm up during the day – sometimes by singing to a CD in the car.
After he finished his Parkinson’s disease song on Thursday, Wanat made a special request.
“Can you do the song with the strokes?” she called out.
Perry obliged. This one was sung to “Desperado” by the Eagles.
Students laughed at some of the lyrics. And since this was a tune that some were clearly familiar with, they sang along, too:
“Treat the early stages, before it’s too-ooo late.”
kkumar@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8017
Copyright 2005 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.