Why do some people get sick and others not?

Towards the end of 1957, not long before Rebecca was born, I re-established contact with a man who had been a classmate of mine at Brighton Public School, had gone on from there to the Adelaide Technical High School and then to the University of Adelaide where he studied engineering. We got to know each other well during his first year at Adelaide Tech and my first year at St Peter's College, traveling together on the train from Brighton to Adelaide, always engaged in earnest conversation. We never ran out of things to talk about. His name was Robert (Bob) Culver. We re-established contact because his mother was one of my patients, and I was delighted to renew our friendship. His wife Cassie (Cassandra)  was a bright person too and got along very well with Wendy. Bob had become an academic engineer, was doing research in a field called rheology, the study of ways fluid flows through confined spaces - important in such diverse applications as water storage and conservation, and blood flow through arteries and veins. Bob was studying basic, seemingly simple questions about fluid flow that nobody previously had addressed or apparently thought about. I told him I was interested in basic questions too. The College of General Practitioners was born about that time, I had attended its meetings, and at one of these I had posed the question at the head of this post - "Why do some people get sick and others not?" It generated some discussion; someone wrote it down, and about 30 years later it turned up as the title of a book that for a while was quite famous. Bob and I kicked this question around too and concluded that interaction between personality, social environment, and disease agents like micro organisms and poor diets accounted for a good deal of illness, but the seemingly simple question held many complexities.  It surely does, and in the years since, a great many person-years of diligent research by battalions of epidemiologists, immunologists, behavioral and social scientists, have clarified some of the confusions that previously perplexed us. Those conversations with Bob Culver in our garden at 16 Henley Beach Road, Mile End, taught me a great deal about ways research workers must think, what constitutes original research, and what a wonderful exciting life it can be in academia.  So Bob Culver and all I learned from him about ways to think and frame questions, also played a part in shaping my my career.

Bob and Cassie Culver lived in the Adelaide Hills. Their home and all their possessions were destroyed in one of the disastrous bush fires that ravaged South Australia, some time in the early 1960s if my memory is accurate.  I wonder if they are still alive. It would be splendid to re-establish contact with them again after all these years.