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`Dr. Cornelia:' Great expectations of all

By Dr. William D. Hillis

Source of Article: COLLEGIUM, A Publication of Baylor University, College of Arts & Sciences, Summer 1998. pp. 10 - 11.

SOMEHOW, HER QUESTIONS ALWAYS IMPLIED THAT SHE KNEW THAT
HER STUDENTS UNQUESTIONABLY HAD ALL THE RIGHT ANSWERS.
IT WAS THE GREAT EXPECTATIONS THAT SHE HAD OF HER STUDENTS THAT ALWAYS KEPT THEM IN PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE.

I had no personal contact with Dr. Cornelia Smith until I was in my senior year at Baylor. But she became the most profound single influence I encountered in college. It happened in a setting that changed the whole direction of my life. In the fall of my junior year I came under the spell of a discerning professor of German, Dr. Patricia Drake (later Shepherd, after her marriage to Dr. James Shepherd of the French department). We had become fast friends by the third quarter of that year, and one day after class she pointedly asked me to remain to talk with her.

"What are you planning to do with your life?" she asked.

When I responded that I was going to become a research chemist, she looked disgruntled. "You won't be happy `pouring things into little bottles' all your life," she stated bluntly.

I was surprised at her apparent naiveté about the great accomplishments of chemistry. As I began to defend my choice, she hurried on to say, "Oh, I'm sure you'd do very well in a career in chemistry. But don't you realize that you need to be in a profession where you have contact with people? You'll be miserable spending all your life in a laboratory."

"Have you looked into medicine?" she asked. I confessed that I had never seriously considered it. "You need to read this book," she insisted, and handed me a copy of Hans Zinsser's As I Remember Him, the Biography of RS, which was in fact the autobiography of the great physician/medical educator/ medical researcher who developed the typhus vaccine.

When I returned in the fall, I went straight to Dr. Drake. I needed direction, for I feared that I had waited far too late in my college career to prepare for entry into medical study.

"I don't think it's too late," she encouraged. "You need to talk with a friend of mine," and the next thing I knew, she had the telephone in her hand, dialing. Then I heard her say, "Cornelia? I have a student who needs to talk with you. "

The rest is history. "Cornelia" was, of course, Dr. Cornelia Marschall Smith, professor and chair of the Department of Biology. Our first visit lasted for a couple of hours. I was certain that I wanted to study medicine after my in-depth discussion with her, and she gave me every assurance that there was yet time in my remaining year of college to take the required biology courses for medical school entry. The rest had already been completed in the course of my degree plan in chemistry.

"Patricia tells me you deserve to have the best possible opportunity" she said matter-of-factly. "You'll need to go to Johns Hopkins, so make your plans accordingly"

In the two morphology courses I had with her (Chordate Morphology and Comparative Anatomy), she taught by the incessant use of questions -- "What is it you see there in the microscope? How did it develop? What does it do? Why is it so well suited for doing what it does? What does it remind you of in amphioxus? Does it occur in vertebrates?" Somehow, her questions always implied that she knew that her students unquestionably had all the right answers. It was the great expectations that she had of her students that always kept them in pursuit of excellence.

I especially remember the spring of 1953, when as a member of the Baylor Bards (the men's chorus of that day), I joined in a singing tour to Mexico that required my absence from comparative anatomy for a week -- with a major examination on the Monday after our return on Sunday evening. I asked Dr. Cornelia if I could be permitted an extra day to study the material presented in my absence, before taking the exam.

"Indeed not, Hillis! You'll take the exam like everyone else on Monday. And I expect you to do exceptionally well!"

I was up until the very wee hours on Monday morning, studying with a generous class-mate who had been present for the classes I missed and making certain that I would live up to the high standards she had set for me.

BE COMPLETELY HONEST, SHE ADVISED.
BE YOURSELF. AND THEN, TEASINGLY, TRY YOUR BEST TO BE HUMBLE.

When the letter came from Johns Hopkins inviting me for an interview (thanks to her valiant efforts to recommend me), I was petrified. What would I possibly say in the interview? I hadn't had a lifetime dream to become a doctor. I wasn't even used to thinking of myself as a premedical student, much less convinced that I was qualified for medicine. "Be completely honest," she advised. "Be yourself" And then, teasingly, "Try your best to be humble." By another miracle I was admitted in March and on my way to Baltimore immediately after graduation in late May.

She prepared me well for the rigors of gross and microscopic anatomy at Johns Hopkins. What surprised me most was that once I was there, she never let me out of her mind. I don't believe a month ever passed during the four years of medical school that I failed to hear from her. Her letters kept me up-to-date with the happenings at Baylor and carried pithy reminders that I had to do my very best in my preparation to become a physician -- "High hopes!" or "Reach beyond!" or "Great expectations!"

I guess I never realized the extent to which her well-wishing extended. In her later years I learned that she kept up with at least 250 students in similar fashion -- most of whom, by then, had become well established physicians in their practice. In her 90s she often quipped that she "had rarely been treated by a doctor whom I hadn't taught to be a good one."

It was she who helped to steer me back to Baylor in 1981. With her strong support and encourage¬ment, I returned as chair of the department she had so long served and to which she had devoted her life.

I remembered her bravery in the early 1940s. When her husband, Dr. Charles G. Smith, had been offered the deanship at Stetson University in Florida in the late 1930s, she had surrendered her chair in biology at Baylor to accompany him. She had chaired biology at Stetson as well. When Dr. Charles G. tired of his administrative role, Dr. Armstrong invited him to return to Baylor, but there was no position open for Dr. Comelia.

Dr. Armstrong had generously asked her to teach English until a post in biology became available. Asked if the transition from teaching biology to teaching English at the college level had not been impossibly difficult, she replied, "Oh, no! It was wonderful. I learned so much!" That reminder alone was adequate reason to rejoice when I was appointed to occupy the Cornelia Marschall Smith Chair in Biology.

Her intimate knowledge of Baylor spanned nine decades. She knew and loved every Baylor president from Samuel Palmer Brooks, in whose home she lived as a Baylor student and tutored his children in German, through Robert B. Sloan, who celebrated her 101st birthday in October 1996 and who helped bear her coffin from Armstrong-Browning Library to Oakwood Cemetery in September 1997.

She loved Baylor with every bone of her body. As a patient in St. Elizabeth Nursing Home in the spring of her last year, she remarked that "Baylor has been unbelievably good to me all these long years, and now they have seen to my being placed in this `Elizabethan palace'!" Save for very modest amounts which she left nieces and nephews, her entire estate was willed to Baylor.

My sweetest memory of her was in the final concert of the Waco Symphony that we attended in Waco Hall in the last few months of her life. She reveled in every note and felt highly frustrated that she was not permitted to applaud at the end of each movement. Near the end of Brahms' Fourth Symphony, she turned to me with the dearest smile that I ever remember to say, "You and I have had many wonderful hours in this great hall, dear Bill, but none has been as glorious as those of this evening!"

Dr. Cornelia will, indeed, abide always in the hearts, minds and memories of all the grateful students who were so wonderfully challenged to give their very best to their endeavors. My own gratitude is immense, and I will always regard her as a precious treasure that Baylor made available to me for almost a half century.

Because of her, I, like so many others who sat at her feet, will still attempt to reach beyond my grasp.

Dr. William D. Hillis
The Cornelia Marschall Smith Professor of Biology

Tracking the Hill Country for Cornelia

Source of Article: COLLEGIUM, A Publication of Baylor University, College of Arts & Sciences, Summer 1998. End Notes, Back Cover.

You stand on the ridge, and stretched below you see
threads of a river cut through the clear valley.

You have come back to the hills, to the country of
hills and rivers -- Pedernales, Comal, Guadalupe -- names
some Spaniard breathed on them as he stooped to their waters,
names flowing south from your childhood.

You have come, in your own time, bearing another name,
have come knowing by heart all names -- woods, birds
wild weeds, Johnson and crabgrass, familiar with
locust and liveoak, with acorns, the leaves underfoot.

And now the Country will change as you walk, stone over
stone, worn by tracks the deer made before you, and the old
Burgers, their wagons winding the valley, who came from
their Rhineland -- einig, entschlossen -- to these hills

bringing the language of G"ethe, crocks and cups, a
piece of old silver, linen, forks, hoe, ax. They knew
how wilderness would crawl over the garden, how radishes
hit by frost would shrivel, how in the heat the

cabbage and rose would go under. But they came,
faces set, full hands cupped to grain and small
clumps of crocus, roots of the tough coral yucca,
cuttings of grapevine to bear in a year after

they would drop, one by one, into the stone
landscape where you come to search out their tracks
on an earth that without them has altered forever. To stand
on the ridge and, by nightfall, rest at the river.

And you know how the light deceives you, how your
vision is tricked by distance, so you step now
careful of outcrop, of the slope and crumble of talus,
of the cliff's sudden break-off in rock. You feel

how your breath comes sharper, holding to scrub bush,
descending, how your eyes must close and open more swiftly
if you are to stand by the river in sunlight and find
your own face in the water reflecting their faces -- the

hardset face of old Meusebach, of Marschall -- splintered
by cedar and liveoak, by the branches they brought
that will break into blossom and flame on these hills,
on this river, again and again and again.

Prof. Ann Miller, Master Teacher & Professor of English

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