76
The Body Electric
Rose himself. He was excited by the article and wanted to know what
I'd done since.
Although Rose taught at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans, he
spent every summer at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on
Cape Cod, so he and his wife drove to Syracuse from there. Despite his
success, Rose had maintained the completely open mind that a great
researcher must have, and he was fascinated by the observations on elec-
tric fields, nerves, anesthesia, and magnetism that I'll recount in the
next chapter. Since then his interest has encouraged me enormously. My
friendship with this fine man and scientist has been fruitful even beyond
the expectations I had then, and, when my wife and I had the Roses to
dinner, we found our pasts were linked by an odd coincidence. As they
walked in the door, Lillian exclaimed, "Dr. Rose! Weren't you at Smith
College in the 1940s?" It turned out that she'd been a friend of Rose's
student lab assistant and had helped catch the frogs for the famous salt-
in-the-wound experiment!