Ottawa 1970-1978

What, if anything, would I do differently if I could relive the years from 1970 to 1978? So much happened to me professionally that at times I know I neglected the family when they needed me, although when I ask Rebecca, David and Jonathan about this, their answers reassure me that in reality I wasn’t as totally devoted to my work as I felt at the time, when family matters seemed often to be no more than background noise in my life, and the children’s passage through adolescence was entirely in Wendy’s hands. Professionally these were the most frenetically busy years of my life. One thing I would do differently if I had my life to live over again, would be to ease up, not take on so many things, not spread myself so thin. That was my worst mistake. I suffered because of this, and so did some others. But on balance, almost everything worked out well.

Our family in living room, 495 Island Park Drive,
November 1971

Among my first acts as department chairman was to establish formal weekly meetings to discuss in depth a relevant topic in public health science.  I set an example by taking the floor myself to discuss the policy implications of my research for the Royal Commission on Medical Education, considering the question how transplantable to Canada the conclusions might be. I invited scientists from other university departments and from Carleton University across town to talk to my group, and  government scientists from Health and Welfare Canada, Environment Canada, Statistics Canada, etc, and before long a weekly series of rigorous seminar discussions was firmly established. It became a tradition that is still going strong more than 40 years later.

I began recruiting staff, and soon had an impressive team of dedicated research workers, several of whom also played prominent roles in the teaching program. Together we established research in aspects of psychiatry (suicide and its prevention, depression, early child development); and a series of community health surveys; and under the direction of Lu Neri, studies of coronary heart disease. We also provided statistical and epidemiological expertise for clinical research workers throughout the medical school. For my first 4-5 years in Ottawa, I was also nominally head of family medicine. Indeed, I had been recruited partly because of my track record as an experienced and successful GP. I wanted to maintain the intellectual connection by way of epidemiological studies of family medical care; but the family physicians found my ideas rather threatening. Family medicine was evolving into an academic discipline in the early 1970s, and as a condition of full accreditation, the College of Family Physicians of Canada insisted that the University of Ottawa establish a free standing autonomous department of family practice. So in 1974-75 my department of epidemiology and community medicine went through a no-fault divorce from the department of family medicine, and lived happily ever after side by side with considerable cross-fertilization and mutual benefit   and never again any acrimonious territorial disputes. I kept my hand in, so to speak, and my clinical skills reasonably sharp and well honed, by seeing patients and supervising students at a street clinic, until one evening in the spring of 1975 when a student asked me what was the right dose for a drug he wanted to prescribe for a condition he'd diagnosed. I'd never heard of either the drug or the diagnosis, so I thought it was time for me to quit while I was ahead. After that, I honed my clinical skills mainly at grand rounds and by watching medical dramas on TV. 

I don’t think the weekly seminars were responsible though they may have helped, but soon I was invited to serve on several influential research grant review committees, notably the federal National Health Grant Committee, its provincial counterpart, and the Ontario Mental Health Research Grant committee.  Then came a phone call from Glenn Lamson, executive secretary of the NIH Epidemiology and Disease Control Study section, the influential review committee that set policy and reviewed applications for research programs, projects and personnel training and support in the USA.  This group met three times annually, usually in Bethesda, NW of Washington, but occasionally elsewhere, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston during my five-year term; additionally there were site visits to assess the quality of the facilities and professional team if the application was sufficiently interesting and/or costly. I was a member of site visit teams to many interesting places all over the USA and continued to serve in an ad hoc capacity as a member of site visit teams for some years after concluding my formal 5-year term.  The consequences of all these activities included several benefits. I visited and got to know the inside workings of prominent research groups all over the USA; I visited cities and towns and – because Glenn Lamson was a gourmet – excellent restaurants, all over the USA.I developed friendship networks with epidemiologists and other public health scientists all over the USA and beyond. Service on all these research grant review committees gave me a magnificent opportunity to get a broad perspective of research in all aspects of public health sciences in Canada and the USA, to meet all the leading research workers in both nations, and to gain insights into research policies and priorities.


In 1971-72 I was elected president of the Canadian Association of Teachers of Preventive and Social Medicine (CATSPM), and became the link to the (US) Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine (ATPM) which I had joined when we lived in Vermont in 1964-65.  Over the following years I became more active in ATPM, serving on several committees and was elected to the board of directors where I acquitted myself to everybody's satisfaction.


In 1972, and again in 1974 and 1976, I had brief, two-month furloughs from Ottawa, working as a short-term adviser or consultant to the World Health Organization South-East Asian Region (WHO/SEARO) in Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. These were each fascinating and mind expanding experiences. I described each of these experiences in chapters of my memoirs, and will post edited versions of each of them in future episodes of this blog. 


One thing I would not do differently would be our home at 495 Island Park Drive.

Wendy and Jonathan in the front garden at our home, 495 Island Park Drive, 1970. The top of the Colorado blue spruce is just visible behind the low hedge. This tree is now more than 20 meters tall.






There is much more I could say about those pressure-packed years of chairing the academic department but this post is already long enough, so I will save further thoughts for another time.