Thinking through the options

My memory of some events late in 1958 is hazy.  I couldn't stop coughing as Wendy and I flew across the Tasman Sea from Melbourne to Christchurch. We stayed with Wendy's brother John and his wife Peggy Anne, then took the train north. Wendy told me I had been delirious and had a high fever during our first night with her parents at Picton. I couldn't get enough air into my lungs, I couldn't cough up any sputum. The local GP sent me to hospital in Blenheim. I was placed in an oxygen tent with a detergent mist that everyone hoped would loosen the mucus in my lungs. For 2-3 days it was a close run affair. The physician caring for me, and I, both though I might die. Slowly I began to recover after about 4 or 5 days in hospital. The influenza pandemic had receded 2 months before I fell ill, and my influenza antibody titre in Blenheim, repeated in Adelaide a few weeks later, did not indicate that I had belatedly been laid low by an influenza virus. X-rays showed diffuse patchy consolidation of both lungs. No pathogenic bacteria were ever recovered from sparse sputum I produced with difficulty. The experts believed I had a non-bacterial pneumonia, likely caused by a virus, but were unable to identify this precisely. Whatever it was, it nearly ended my life and while I slowly recovered over the next 2 months, I had time to pause and think deeply about my life to that point, and my future, our future, because clearly Wendy was an equal partner in all this.  There was a test cricket match between Australia and the West Indies during my convalescence, not long before Christmas. I recall watching as though in slow motion, a ball that a batsman hit high in the air and deep, almost to the boundary not far from where I was sitting in hot sunshine; the nearest fieldsman ran to get under it and took a spectacular catch. As I watched this little drama on the cricket ground, my thoughts fell into place like that lazily descending cricket ball. I thought of the two I knew in my own age group who had died in the pandemic, and all the others I had seen.  I recalled my experiences in the infectious disease hospital during Adelaide's last-ever poliomyelitis epidemic when for a few months I'd left the practice where at that time I had been a salaried assistant, not a partner, and had seriously considered specializing in infectious diseases. I had always been fascinated by the interaction between humans and infectious pathogens, and  it was clear by the late 1950s that antibiotics were not the magic bullet we thought at first, but just another weapon, albeit a powerful one, that we could deploy to help us overcome some infections of some people. We needed a different strategy, different tactics, to keep entire populations free of diseases like tuberculosis and polio - with both of which I had rich clinical experience. I worked for about 9 months in a TB sanatorium near St Albans in Hertfordshire, and for 4-5 months in the infectious diseases hospital in Adelaide. I'd seen cases of rare and exotic diseases, including even cases of smallpox. Although many at that time thought modern medical science was rapidly "conquering" infectious pathogens, I thought otherwise, and events since then have proved me right. As the fieldsman took the catch, I concluded my train of thought: I wanted to study epidemiology. The challenging question that remained was to decide how, and when, and where, to go about doing this.