Captain Shreve Grad Gets View of Medical World -- And Likes It

              Sunday, Aug. 18, 1974
THE SHREVEPORT TIMES
Harold Rosbottom holds a recording spirometer for 11-year-old Joyce
Denise Chillis as she demonstrates the procedure used for the simple
lung function test, one that Rosbottom helped administer as a summer
volunteer working for Dr. Bettina Hilman. (Times Photo by Billy Up-shaw)
Captain Shreve Grad
Gets View of Medical
World - And Likes It
By Elaine King
Times Medical Writer
Harold Rosbottom spent his summer
vacation this year working and his pay
was not in money but in experience — a
taste of the world of health care that he
wants to enter as a doctor.
He will leave Tuesday for Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge where
he will be a freshman in premed.
His experience working as a volunteer
with Dr. Bettina Hilman this summer
made Rosbottom realize that being a
doctor is really what 1 want to do."
Incentive From Experience
And the working-learning experience
has given him incentive to work hard
toward his goal of becoming a doctor.
Dr. Hilman conducts Monday and
Wednesday clinics at Confederate
Memorial Medical Center. She is as-sociate
professor of pediatrics,
microbiology and immunology at
Louisiana State University School of
Medicine at Shreveport and chief of the
pulmonary and allergy section.
It was happenstance that Rosbottom
came to work with Dr. Hilman in the
summer after his graduation from Cap-tain
Shreve High School. His mother,
Mrs. H. L. Rosbottom, knows Dr.
Hilman and mentioned to the doctor that
he will enter college as a premed student
this fall.
Dr. Hilman suggested Rosbottom, 17,
come to one of her clinics.
"I went one Monday and I just loved
it," he said.
In addition to the clinics at CMMC,
Dr. Hilman conducts clinics two days a
month at Schumpert Hospital.
Working with Dr. Hilman, Rosbottom
got a chance to help with puhnondary
functions and to listen to patients'
breathing, look at X-rays and "I got a
little patient-relationship" background,
he added. Also he had the chance to see
cystic fibrosis patients.
Dr. Hilman praised Rosbottom's work
with her saying he had provided
valuable service to the hospital and
patients and had done work as a
technologist as well.
"I feel we owe it to young people" en-tering
the medical field, she said, to "let
them know what they are getting into."
In the past, she said she has had
other students work with her and gain
first-hand experience. Dr. Hilman
believes that one of the functions of a
medical school is to offer young people
interested in medicine a chance to see
medicine first hand.
There have been cases, she added,
where a student has decided he did not
want to become a doctor afterwards.
Rosbottom said sometimes he is
asked if seeing patients needing medical
attention doesn't depress him. His an-swer
"It makes me want to do it
more... to help them."
He has learned "some about rigging
an X-ray, what to listen for" and gained
other practical experience.
Dr. Hilman, he said, "has been great.
She'd tell me about an X-ray . . . and it
got to the point where she'd ask me what
I saw on an X-ray." "Maybe what 1 saw
could be right," or it could be something
else, he said.
Rosbottom realizes there is a long
way between a freshman premed student
and a medical student He's willing to go
to any medical school that will accept
him.
But even thinking about that is "so
far in the future," he emphasized. He
will find out in a year or so in college if
"I'm cut out for it," he said.
He knows that he will have to work
hard at college, but it will be worth it,
he believes. He has seen that doctors do
work hard, but he has also seen the
satisfaction that comes from helping
others.
"So much has been thrown at me that
I can't remember it all," he said.
But next summer, if possible, Rosbot-tom
wants to work at a hospital . . . "I
want to spend my spare time around
that type of atmosphere," he said.
Impressed by Acceptance
Acceptance by the doctors, interns
and other staff members at CMMC has
impressed Rosbottom. At first, he said
he was afraid they would "think what's
this kid doing up here." But, he noted,
"they've been great to me."
Working with children in pediatrics,
he thinks, is a challenge. The children
come in scared and "it's a challenge to
win them over as friends," he said. If
the child is won over, it's half the battle,
he thinks.
Many of the tests are effort-dependent,
meaning that the effort a
child puts into the test affects the result.
For instance, the recording spirometer
that records lung function that Rosbot-tom
used to test child with this summer.
The child must blow into the machine
to register how his lungs are functioning
and the effort the child makes causes a
difference in the results, he explained.