Farewell to Edinburgh

Three iconic images head this final report on Edinburgh, written in the tranquility of my home office after I got back safely last night. They are in reverse order from top to bottom but no matter. I photographed the Castle and Grassmarket from the broad deck outside my room on a lovely warm sunny afternoon a few minutes after I checked in on Friday August 5, opportunistically snapped Greyfriars' Bobby between rain squalls on a morning stroll up the steep hill from Grassmarket a few days later. From then on it got too windy, wet and cold for me to take photos, and I got too busy fulfilling my promise to my host Raj Bhopal, to write a report on a project of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, "The People's Library of Epidemiology" which he wants to publish in a journal later this year. When we lived in Edinburgh in the 1960s, summers were always wet and windy, calm, warm sunny days were rare. But the wetness and coldness of these few days in August broke previous records. On Wednesday the maximum was 10 C, on Thursday it was 9 C, with drenching, monsoon-like - but cold - rain, driving incessantly down in squalls of unprecedented severity. Fortunately the World Congress of Epidemiology provided more than enough incentive to stay indoors and take part on some extremely stimulating scientific sessions. I think this may have been the best IEA meeting I have ever attended in the 50 years that I have belonged to and played a part in the affairs of this prestigious organization. I confess I played hookey and did a little walking about old favourite haunts instead of staying indoors all day every day -- protected from the elements by Wendy's splendid L L Bean plastic raincoat and hood, congratulating myself for my prescience in taking it instead of my shabby old raincoat. So each morning I climbed the steep, curly road from Grassmarket to George 1V Bridge, along Chambers Street to The Royal Scottish Museum, or past it to what used to be James thin & Co book shop, is now a branch of Blackwell's. But I saw, heard, even had my 2-cents' worth in discussions, at several outstanding scientific sessions. One of the highlights for me was undoubtedly Raj Bhopal's talk in the opening session, where
he stepped nobly into the breach to replace Michael Marmot who inconsiderately and I think arrogantly withdrew at very short notice. George Davey Smith gave a brilliant, exciting blend of sometimes obscure public health history and life course epidemiology, a very hard act to follow. But Raj Followed it brilliantly with a superb summary of some aspects of the turbulent movements of people about the world that may be the most important social, cultural, demographic, economic and political phenomena of the past century. Talking it over later, Raj and I agreed also that its effects on population genetics, which it is too soon to observe and measure, are more likely to be beneficial than adverse. The impact on health of migration was my first research interest when I was a family doctor in the 1950s and saw what was happening in my own practice, wrote about it, decided I wanted to study it more, and left general practice for epidemiology. I got side-tracked into other kinds of epidemiological research, but I've often wondered how things would have turned out if I'd stuck with that first interest. Certainly it's become a far more fruitful field of study now. (The riots and looting in English cities last week almost certainly had no direct connection to racial or ethnic tensions, but were a spontaneous upwelling of discontent and sheer wickedness rather than mere naughtiness, mainly by "have-not" kids who seized the opportunity of a peaceful protest to assault the better-off stores and little shops in their neighbourhoods, loot them and carry off whatever they could, burn and destroy what they couldn't carry, and otherwise wreak as much havoc as they could). There were many other interesting sessions, including one on the Supercourse, in which its founder and leader, Ron Laporte, insists I played a major role, though I can't see what role this could have been, unless what I'd written prophetically was what got him going. But now I'm beginning to ramble. Let's call this Part 1 of the final blog about Edinburgh and I'll carry on later with another installment.