"Alice Manning is on the phone," my assistant announced one day in 1962. Alice, who later became a much beloved Gazette writer, was secretary to the area’s two orthopedic surgeons, Don Chrisman and George Snook. "She wants to know if you can make some lecture slides for Dr. Chrisman," which was not an unreasonable request of commercial photographers. And so began nearly four decades of collaboration, discovery and learning.

Don Chrisman arrived without the usual illustrations from books and journals to be made into slides, but rather came with a pile of huge x-ray films to be photographed. And the slides required weren’t the normal 35mm variety. No, he needed large, glass-plate Lantern slides. So already there were things I needed to learn. How to photograph x-rays, and ‘just what is a Lantern slide’ became immediate, time-sensitive challenges, since Don’s students at Yale Medical School were waiting. Our local orthopod was so esteemed at Yale that unlike other part-time instructors who are clinical or adjunct faculty, the medical school awarded Don a full professorship. He was a natural teacher, as I would soon discover.

I probably expected that, as time went on and we gained some experience doing Don’s lecture photography, this very busy surgeon – and there were only these two orthopedists in the county four decades ago – might drop off the x-ray films for photography, and fly out the door on his way to his next ‘case’, as surgeons usually refer to their patients. I was very wrong. Don didn’t have ‘cases’, at least not in my office. He had patients – real people - with presenting problems, and histories, and stories. Don was fully invested in his relationships with people that he could help, so every film came to me with a mini-lecture, an explanation of what had needed fixing and how it was accomplished, right here, in the surgery at Cooley Dickinson. He was very proud of the sophisticated procedures successfully performed in our small town hospital. And it was with obvious enthusiasm, that he went on at length to me about the outcomes of surgeries as we compared before and after x-rays on the enormous viewer that soon graced my office.

And so it went for a lot of years, until Don retired from practice. But wait, my ‘classroom’ was not to be vacant for long. A compelling new interest, a new degree from Umass, a new field of research, brought Don back to our photographic collaborations, with a whole new series of mini-lectures for me to hear. From the living to the dead - the long dead - as paleontology and archeology, the searching, discovering and identifying of old bones and artifacts from the Southwest, consumed Don’s ‘second career’. He brought his considerable medical expertise to his new profession, with the help of CAT scans and spectrographic analysis to try and unveil the past. Our photography now evolved into macro and micro work, and soon to electron microscopy. And with every project, he taught me more, perhaps more than I wanted or needed to know, but certainly more than I could absorb.

Don has gone now. First from Northampton to a retirement community in Bedford, and now, at 83, gone for a final time to whatever lecture hall the hereafter may afford him.

For my part, I miss those long talks about surgery, and bones both old and new. There probably isn’t much that I’ve retained in concrete knowledge, but I know that in my travels with Dr. O. Donald Chrisman I learned about patience, compassion, and dedication and yes, focus. It was an unexpected education.

– Dick Fish
(Dick Fish is a photographer at Smith College)