Professors: Respiratory Physiology Cough Cough

Last year in physiology, we studied the lungs with an old geezer of a professor. Now, sometimes old professors are adorable, but that wasn't the case.

For some reason, this fellow is a respiratory physiologist and a massive smoker. I don't know how he does it, and it totally gutted his credibility. If you didn't actually catch him smoking outside of class, you could easily tell by his constant coughing. For a lecturer, that's bad enough in its own right, but try and imagine his whole persona:

We have a tall, skinny, dinosaur lurching back and forth across the lecture hall as he tells us about the lungs. He warbles on about a graph from some study in the 70s, which is obviously a scanned photocopy of a photocopy, punctuated by a good cough every here and there. He'd often have a hand clutching his chest, and I don't know if I can even describe how slowly he speaks. You can tell that he's thinking while he's talking instead of beforehand, because there are huge pauses between every few words.

One time, he was saying something along the lines of, "Here... we can see... that... there are..." and the suspense just kept building. What is it about! I want to know! 

Taking all that together, we kept waiting for him to keel over one day. After all, he looked like a stiff breeze might knock him over. His lectures weren't very good, but there was this morbid curiosity that kept us interested: "Is he going to snuff it today?" At the end of his very last lecture, I'm not sure if it was a relief or a disappointment that he'd struggled through the entire lecture series without incident.

Another classic downfall of his lectures is that, despite being decent at the computer, his resources and references are ancient. Unlike many dinosaur professors, he can successfully manage a powerpoint presentation (although he wasn't sure how to turn it into a slide show--that seems to be a common problem), but he's definitely living in the past. All of his graphs and images were from studies done decades ago. I'm pretty sure he got a lot of his diagrams from an old human physiology textbook that's not in print anymore, or at least is very obscure and old.

He had some weird device to demonstrate a property of the lungs, which I'm pretty sure was something like a condom tied with string in a clear plastic tube. He encouraged people to try it (you had to blow into it), but I doubt you'll be surprised to hear no one did.