With a new wave of aspiring doctors settling into campus life, the Misnomer decided to hitch up to the 80 and take the perilous journey over to the west side of campus to catch up with current events at the medical school. After making landfall, our reporters discovered a herd of medical students standing outside the UW School of Nursing, crying. After our reporters were done laughing at them, they asked these students what exactly had happened to cause such a commotion, which is when we learned the horrible truth: they had just failed UW Madison’s hardest exam, the boo boo kissing test.
“I am just devastated,” said Hannah Habenkuss, one of the students outside the school, “I spent so many long nights studying for this.”
The boo boo kissing test has long been one of the UW’s most notorious exams, surpassing even the School of Engineering’s kite flying test and the Wisconsin School of Business’s coloring within the lines assessment. Conceived in 1863, the Maekart Ouchy Smooching Exam, often just referred to as the boo boo kissing test, was created after Dr. John Maekart discovered that Civil War soldiers returning from the battlefield were 50% more likely to recover from their disgusting pus leaking septic gunshot wounds after he gave them a wittle kiss.
Future U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant would end up being so impressed with Maekart’s kissing that once the war was over he awarded the doctor with a grant to start a medical school. Maekart, a long time resident of Baraboo, Wisconsin decided to open the Maekart School of Orally Stimulated Regeneration right in the center of the swampy part of Madison. Decades later, the UW Health University Hospital would be built on the very same spot. And after an attempt by the UW Health board of directors to commit tax fraud went wrong, Maekart’s school was tied directly and irrevocably into the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. As a consequence of the merger, the tricky test that has stumped so many wannabe doctors is still being used to this day.
Some have criticized the exam for being outdated after some university historians found Maekart’s accounts of medical kissing to be “completely unfounded” and “verifiably stupid.” These historians contend that Maekart’s school was never supposed to be a part of the UW Madison, as the school that he built was only ever known for catching fire seven times and being a shed.
Meanwhile, others point out the fact that test participants are asked to kiss boo boos in some stranger parts of the body such as the lower calf or the esophagus, the latter of which is quite notably inside of a person. However, despite these criticisms surrounding the founding circumstances and applicability of orally stimulated healthcare, there are still some that call this test a tradition here at UW Madison.
“Kissing people on their ouchies is just as much of a part of the Badger experience as getting your bike stolen and binge drinking,” said Earnest Hugfold, a 2020 Alumni. “Honestly, I think something would be lost around here if they took this away from students.”
Still, students like Habenkuss are still upset over the results of the most recent exam. “I just wish that getting my medical license didn’t rest on my ability to kiss the professor’s liver.”