Honoree: Dr. Martha Sucheston

>> FRANCESCA DRUGGAN: I will be speaking about Dr. Martha Sucheston, who is a faculty emeritus for the Division of Anatomy, College of Medicine at OSU. My name is Francesca Druggan. What I do at OSU when I'm here is, I'm a locum pathologist assistant for the Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, and I am also in the graduate school. I met Marty in fall of 2004 at another institution, at which she was recruited to help build a cadaver-based human anatomy program.

My relationship with Marty, it had a very transitional pace. It went from supervisor to mentor to friend. My first memory of meeting Marty was a phone call that I got, and when I eventually met her the next day after the phone call, it was just, right off-the-bat. We hit it off. She was just intelligent and enigmatic, just everything you would ever want to be. Marty definitely has a duality. She goes two different directions. She has a work persona, and when she's not at work and we get to hang out and everything, she definitely has a personal persona. In her work demeanor she's always professional, intelligent, poised. She's driven, personal, she's really kind. She's outgoing. She's giving, and she definitely is a loyal friend and a loving mother.

She turned my skill set that I had in pathology into another arena. She basically honed, if you will, a rough stone, and she made me into an anatomist-in-training. So, she basically opened me up to the art form which is anatomy. The contribution that she made in our relationship, that made a difference in my life is, any time I stumbled or I lost faith, Marty was always there to kind of like spear me on. So, that was good.

Lessons she taught me, directly and indirectly: there are multiple lessons, multiple, but I think the two most important were, in instruction, always be a leader and be professional, and the second one was believe in yourself, and others will follow. She taught these lessons by example, always.

I think the most interesting thing is that she used to pop in unannounced when I would be instructing. And I was a nervous first-year instructor, and I ended up instructing for several years after that. And she would just pop in unannounced, because she was also the lead instructor. If she was smiling, you know you made no mistake. If she wasn't making any expression, you knew that you had made plenty. So I was lucky that I always had smiles.

Her character, her personality, what made her such an important person in my life is, I never met another person so eager to pass on her experience, her skill set, and share the limelight unconditionally. There was never any strings attached. Dr. Sucheston is definitely that pebble that gets dropped in the pond that you continue to feel the ripples forever, because every student that she taught is either a clinician that is teaching another clinician or is an instructor that is teaching other clinicians or instructors how to be a better clinician or a better anatomist.

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