It was not what you'd expect to hear in a hospital. In the atrium at Stanford Hospital, the impromptu matinee was the frisky jazz notes of Vince Guaraldi's Linus and Lucy. Lawrence Mathers, eyes closed, was lost in a musical trance surrounded by patients connected to IV lines and oxygen tanks. The hands that I was so used to seeing in clumsy gloves as they dug away inside the thorax of a cadaver were nimbly flowing across the keys, as if they were an extension of the baby grand.
That wasn't the first time Dr. Mathers, a professor of pediatrics and surgery, caught me off guard. My first encounter with him was as a timid high school senior eager to present my amateur anatomy illustrations. After 10 minutes of silent and meticulous examination, he peered at me over his spectacles and asked, "Are you a '49ers fan?" During the next two hours, we realized that our mutual interests traversed the realms of anatomy, jazz, Bay Area sports and Byzantine art. He nonchalantly disclosed the nickname affectionately assigned to him by the medical students: "The Cremaster." (He didn't pause to identify this muscle of male anatomy—which probably saved me some embarrassment.) That night I replayed our conversation in my mind, flattered that the chief of anatomy would dedicate an afternoon to discussing my hobbies and aspirations.
In three subsequent years, there would be afternoons in Dr. Mathers's office reviewing anatomy slides from the Bassett Collection, a piano performance with him at a community health fair, and trips to the opera with him and my family. I wasn't particularly fond of the opera, but his generous distribution of gummy bears during the event and his uncanny ability to recite the libretto along with the tenor voice captivated me. He quickly established himself as a humble mentor, and I strove to emulate his versatility and his warmth with colleagues and patients. I saw that despite all his superhuman abilities, he was also as vulnerable as they come. My veneration for him only grew when he struggled to maintain his composure over the phone while describing the loss of a patient in the neonatal intensive care unit.
For the preemies in the NICU, the people who donated their bodies to medicine and those of us in between, Dr. Mathers illuminated all facets of the human condition. In the years after his unexpected death in 2007, I have recognized how blessed my family and I were to have him in our lives. At times I am envious of students who were formally taught by him, yet he instilled in me a lifetime's worth of knowledge that could never be taught in an anatomy class.
Rishi Bhatnagar, '08, will start medical school at UC-San Diego this fall.
