Transforming times

In recent posts on this blog I have restated in different words some of the events I described in my memoirs, written more than 20 years ago, that led to my career change at the end of 1959. I'll continue the narrative here. At the recent workshop on memoir-writing, our mentor Jon Peirce discussed 'defining moments' but I have to describe a prolonged period of decision-making. Wendy and I agonized over this for most of the first three years of our lives together. It can truly be called a defining period, but not a defining moment. Some experiences during the period were important parts of my intellectual development, and because of the way these shaped my perception of life and the culture and society in which I lived, they became factors in the ultimate decision that Wendy and I faced and made together.

I began to study several scholarly disciplines that had obvious relevance in my medical practice but had been entirely absent from the medical curriculum, notably social and behavioural sciences. I devoured some of the standard works in these domains, Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung, Melanie Klein, Margaret Mead, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and others. I began to explore epidemiology and environmental health, mainly in current medical and public health journals that I began to read. I began to classify and count the patients I was seeing in my office and in their homes. I read an electrifying article by J N Morris, "The Uses of Epidemiology" in the British Medical Journal, then I bought and read closely the short book with the same name, Uses of Epidemiology,  by J N Morris, and resolved that somehow I must find a way to work with and learn from him. These exciting concepts that Jerry Morris explained so clearly, and a few other seminal papers on epidemiology opened my eyes and my mind to a whole new way to think about sickness and health.

I took a speed-reading course. This had a dramatic impact: I found, as others before me had found, that as my reading speed increased from about 400-450 words per minute to 2000 words or more per minute, my comprehension and retention of what I was reading, increased too. This seems counter-intuitive until it is explained: when reading slowly, the mind is easily distracted, whereas when reading at maximum speed, the brain is totally occupied by absorbing the information on the printed page. By the time I had completed the speed reading course my eyes had become conditioned to taking in a paragraph  at a glance, and when reading a small paperback book, I could often take in a whole page at a glance - and retain the content of that page more completely, more efficiently, than when reading slowly. Of all the intellectual advances I made in the 3 years from 1957 to 1959, this was far and away the most important.

A cultural change was quite important too. I had enough Italian-speaking patients who did not speak English, to motivate me to learn enough of their language to communicate with them. Italian is a lovely language and I picked it up rapidly and easily. If you can pronounce an Italian word, you can spell it, and if you see it written down, you can pronounce it, because unlike English and French, Italian spelling and pronunciation are consistently and reliably related. I got far enough in Italian to be able to read Dante with the aid of a dictionary, and to understand the libretto of some of my favourite operas. "Che gelida manina" is so much more musical, more poetic, than "Your little hand is frozen!"  

I became active in the newly established College of General Practitioners, was appointed to committees, spoke at meetings, traveled interstate and networked with like-minded GPs in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. I discussed these new activities with the professor of medicine in Adelaide, and he encouraged me to continue, to find linkages between community-based family practice and academic research. He encouraged me to think about taking a year of full-time study at the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, then return to Adelaide where, he hoped, there might by then be scope for a university-based academic general practice.

At the same time as this, the senior partner in the group practice I had joined, was a prominent medical politician, president of what was then the Australian branch of the British Medical Association. He began to take me under his wing as a potential next generation medical politician who could succeed him and move up in the hierarchy of medical politics.  However, medical politics didn't interest me. The official medical association, soon to become the Australian Medical Association, existed to serve the interests of members of the medical profession. I was then and have always been more concerned about serving the interests of the general public. The senior partner in the practice was a gentleman through and through, a thoroughly decent man, had become a good personal friend with whom I shared many values and beliefs but I differed from him in priorities. I had absolutely no interest in serving in an organization concerned primarily if not exclusively with advancing the interests of the medical profession.

Rejecting the notion of rising through the hierarchy of the medical association was one thing. Turning away from a prosperous group practice that offered a lifetime of security and stability was something else altogether. Wendy and I agonized over this for many months, finally deciding late in 1959 that we would leap recklessly into the unknown and unknowable, leave the comfort, stability and security of general practice for a very uncertain and surely a far less prosperous life on the lowest rung of the academic ladder. I'll say more about the factors that led to our final decision in another post.

Those first three years of our married life were formative years in our marriage too. We had two children close together - Rebecca was born ten months after we married, and David followed fifteen months later. Wendy and I were both over 30 years old, accustomed to autonomy and independence and beginning to get set in our ways when we married. We had to get used to each other too, get adjusted to life as a married couple and as parents. How we managed to achieve that is another entirely separate story.