Well, the photos appeared in that last post after all. Don't ask me how, or why one is smaller than the other. I'm just blundering about, haven't a clue what's happening half the time. Anyway, that second, smaller photo is us two as we were at our golden wedding anniversary banquet on Saint Valentine's Day, February 14, 2007. I suppose Janet Wendy looks a little older fifty years on but her smile is as radiant as ever. The weather was very different: it was 104 F in Adelaide on our wedding day in 1957, and I am pretty sure it never got nearer zero C than about 10 below in Ottawa on February 14 2007; and we had snow, crisp, squeaky pure white and lovely to behold as our friends Ian and Carrol McDowell took us home after the banquet. There's a more recent photo taken on our anniversary this year that I'll try to paste into this blog some time soon.

Today is International Women's Day. The 99th International Women's Day, which surprised me; I had no idea we had been acknowledging the significant roles and important status of women for so long (although not doing much about it). Looking back to my adolescence and young adulthood, a period ranging from 70 to 60 years ago, I recall with a mixture of embarrassment and shame how chauvinist we 'men' were about the invasion of our comfortable world by 'girls.' Women and girls played a crucial role in the war effort during the second world war that dominated events during that period of my life, but after the war ended we boys and young men expected, even required, the girls and young women to get out of our way, to leave professions like medicine to men, to focus exclusively on subservient professional roles as nurses and less 'important' professions in emerging fields like physiotherapy. It didn't happen; it would have been like trying to stop an incoming tide. We had 15 women in a class of 60 when I started the 6-year medical course in 1944. We 'men' all thought it was a waste of valuable and limited medical school places to allocate 25% of them to 'girls' who would be useless as doctors, although we grudgingly made an allowance for the facts of wartime stringencies. We were quite sure almost if not all would marry, drop out, never practice. In fact at our 50th anniversary reunion and indeed long before then, much higher proportions of the women than men had risen to top positions in specialties as diverse as radiotherapy, anesthesiology, neurosurgery, and the Flying Doctor service in remote outback Australia. They were harbingers of what was to come. For the last 20 years or more, women have often outnumbered men in medical schools throughout the English-speaking world. They have transformed the practice of medicine in all sorts of good ways. I am on record affirming that the feminizing of my profession of medicine is one of the three best things to have happened to medicine in my lifetime. The other two are advances in medical science that make it possible to prevent or cure many previously fatal and disabling conditions, and removal of financial barriers between sick people and the care they need, in all civilized nations. (In this and several other ways the USA is not a civilized nation, which is the reason we chose not to become Americans and live there, chose Canada instead). CBC Radio, another of the good things about Canada, had a series of items in its morning documentary program, The Current, on the roles and status of women in several countries, drawing attention to many impediments that remain in women's way, so although there is much to celebrate, there is even more that has yet to be done to achieve genuine equity and equality, here in Canada and in just about every other country on earth. That's a challenge I hope my grand-daughter Christina will do something about!