History books

The six years in medical school almost destroyed my mind. In the three preclinical years I had to learn and understand vocabulary equivalent to three or four modern languages, like Spanish, Russian, Greek, Danish, the technical terms of the basic biological sciences, which I had never learnt in school because they weren't taught, then the technical terms used in anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, altogether some 14,000 to 16,000 new technical words, and the phrases that linked some of them together; That was just the beginning. I moved on to the clinical years, three more years of learning other new words and phrases, the ones that really matter in caring for the sick, names of symptoms, diseases, diagnostic tests, operative procedures, and drugs used to treat them. At night I would toss and turn restlessly trying to sleep, while these strange new words and phrases chased each other about the surface of my brain. One night, desperately tired after many insomniac nights, I picked up a history book, H.G. Wells's Outline History of the World. It was an abridged edition of a larger book by H G Wells that I later acquired and read from cover to cover. But I started modestly on the smaller book, devoured it and fell asleep, relaxed and contented after learning things I had never known before about the history of the world, all written in plain, simple English without a weird technical word or phrase anywhere. That was the beginning of a wonderful voyage of discovery that went on in parallel with learning the languages of medicine and was far more enjoyable. I moved on to other history books, Arthur Bryant's histories of England and the English people, another history of England by a man named Greene that was a textbook for first year university modern history, and several more while I was still a medical student,histories of the Classical Greek and Roman civilizations (The Glory that Was Greece and The Grandeur that was Rome, among others, a bit hackneyed and overloaded with cliches, but both basically accurate I believe). Others from those times when I was a young doctor include Xenaphon's March of the Ten Thousand, his account of a famous retreat by his defeated army across Asia Minor to the Aegean Sea, that made me wonder who will be the Xenaphon to tell of the Dunkirk defeat/victory in which much of the British army was saved from destruction by an armada of English small boats in 1940. Other books from those early years of reading history include Julius Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul in what seemed a racy and eminently readable Penguin translation, Herodotus's "histories" -a fascinating compendium of fables, gossip, travels and snippets of genuine history including accounts of the famous battles between the Greeks and the Persians. I've been reading history books off and on ever since. When I back-packed around Europe in 1953 and 1954, I carried a Penguin book or two; one was Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, written by a soldier-scholar who fought in it, a great book, a "desert island" book, still, two and a half thousand years later, a wonderfully vivid and fascinating account of human folly and fruitless conflict that solved nothing and created problems worse than any that caused the war in the first place. I read Rex Warner's translation, brand new in the 1950s, now the standard English translation. Not long after that I sailed home to Australia as ship's doctor on a freighter, a long sea voyage for which I was well prepared with a large supply of books, including Winston Churchill's account of the 1939-45 world war -- a rather self-serving account as I later realized, but a beautifully written book. Whether it was worthy of the Nobel Prize for literature is another matter, but all the civilized world including the Swedish Royal Academy was grateful to Churchill for saving civilization from the Nazis, so few objected to the award. Probably Toynbee came next, with a theory of history that offered explanations for the rise and fall of civilizations; and along the way and ever since there've been historical biographies and detailed accounts of interesting periods, like the Elizabethan age, the 1920s, the Roman conquests, Prescott's histories of the Spanish invasion and conquest of the civilizations of Mexico and Peru, the Jazz Age, histories of Paris, Vienna, the Mediterranean, histories of Australia, of Canada, of the USA and of Scotland, nations where I've lived long enough to put down roots. As successive volumes of Will Durant's massive history of civilizations and human progress were published, I bought and read them. I realized pretty quickly that the scholarship was sometimes shoddy, but there were well written which made for very easy reading. The main benefit was the pointers they gave to more reliable and scholarly histories, of India, of Islam, China, the Byzantine empire, Napoleonic Europe. I'm still at it in my 80s; among my recent acquisitions is a small paperback history of the Hundred Years War, a series of conflicts really that included Henry V's battles against the French and his great victory at Agincourt. David has just borrowed it, so I shall have to wait until he returns it before I can read it thoroughly. Next time I tackle this challenging subject of "what to read and why" I can perhaps write about books on science.