The 1980s

When Wendy and I returned from New York to Ottawa just before Labor Day 1979, we settled into a comfortable town house looking out on Hampton Park less than a Km from where we had lived for 8 years on Island Park Drive. Wendy picked up her volunteer activities where she'd left off, sharpening her skills as a docent at the Museum of Nature. Rebecca was living in Montreal, a part-time student at Concordia University; David was an officer cadet at the Royal Military College in Kingston, and Jonathan was a student at Broadview High School. I soon acquired interesting new duties. I had left the chairman's office of the department of epidemiology and community medicine when I started my sabbatical leave. Gilles Hurteau, dean of the faculty, appointed me secretary of the medical school, a role comparable to that of registrar, so I continued to serve on the faculty advisory board. Liberated from departmental administrative chores, I was free to devote more time to my first love, corrupting the innocent young minds of medical students with my subversive ideas about the importance of preserving and promoting good health.  I became active in the Student Advisory Group, a useful social bridge between faculty and students that led to development of an official mentor program, among other things. With a lot of help from Janet Christie-Seely, Paula Stewart and several others, I reshaped a previously unpopular first year course on 'Human Growth and Development' into a new multidisciplinary course that we called 'Human Dimensions of Health and Illness' with emphasis on social and emotional determinants of health and disease, small group learning activities and getting out of classrooms into clinical settings and patients' own homes. It was a pilot study for problem-based learning that was introduced the year after I officially retired from my active teaching role, in 1992. Soon this course became the most popular unit in the first year and even attracted students from other years and from the school of nursing (where I taught a course on social medicine). I chaired the curriculum committee - an important position because we were initiating major curriculum reforms.

My role as editor in chief of the massive Maxcy-Rosenau textbook of Public Health and Preventive Medicine made me a sort of walking, talking encyclopedia of all things to do with public health. This opened several doors.  I was appointed scientific editor of the Canadian Journal of Public Health and began to transform it into a better quality peer-reviewed journal than it had ever been before. The Law Reform Commission of Canada recruited me as a consultant for several ongoing projects, notably the regulation of urea formaldehyde foam insulation (UFFI) which was a suspected carcinogen. My interests in environmental epidemiology and in ethics coalesced in interesting ways in the European Region of the World Health Organization and in the affairs of the Council of Biology Editors. Most important of my new roles was an invitation from two former mentors, Kerr White and John Brotherston, president and secretary of the International Epidemiological Association, to compile and edit a glossary or dictionary of epidemiological terms, a topic that had interested me since 1964 when I observed frequent inconsistency and uncertainty in the terms epidemiologists were using to describe their concepts, methods and procedures. This was the genesis of the Dictionary of Epidemiology, which may be my most important scholarly contribution.

34 Waverley Street, Ottawa is the end unit nearest the camera in the row of town houses near the Rideau Canal at this end of Waverley Street









Our town house was comfortable and splendidly located, backing on to Hampton Park where bird and native animal life flourished; but it was a long way from the university and the medical school. Wendy spent much energy and time hunting for a more strategically located home. We decided on a row house at 34 Waverley Street in the 'Golden Triangle', at the corner where the Rideau Canal turns 90 degrees before heading to the locks between Parliament Hill and the Chateau Laurier. We could walk easily to the great pulsating heart of downtown Ottawa. We lived there for the next 11 years. We made good friends among our neighbours, entertained a good deal, and covered the walls of our home with book shelves and Wendy's paintings.

David, Jonathan and Rebecca on the rear deck,
34 Waverley Street, Ottawa, c. 1982

Three generations of Last men: Ray, David and John Last in the Hunterian Anatomy Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London, 1984







We traveled extensively in the 1980s, to Europe almost every year, combining work for me and rail pass holidays with Wendy when the work was done. We visited Paris several times, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, Pompeii, Florence, Venice, and Switzerland and Sweden several times; in 1982 we went to Hong Kong and China, and in 1985, at the time of the centenary of the University of Adelaide medical school, we had the first of what became annual visits to Australia and New Zealand. At the Centenary celebrations in Adelaide in 1985, we had a rare reunion with my father, my brother and me - only the second time in Peter's and my adult life when we were all three together in the same city at the same time.

John, Ray and Peter Last at Peter's home in Adelaide, August 1985











Some time in the spring of 1987, I was visited by a senior official in the Australian Medical Association. He came with an invitation to me to return to Sydney to become editor of the Medical Journal of Australia and a professor of public health at the University of Sydney.  It was a dream job, tailor made for me. Alas, although very tempting, it came too late. All of us in the family except perhaps Jonathan were too heavily involved in our professional, social, and emotional lives to face such a major disruption and the social and cultural problems of re-entry to Australian life and society. We had been back often enough to recognize some unfortunate similarities in values and behaviours between Australia and Texas. It would have been yet another international migration with all the cultural adjustments to face yet again. We realized that all of us had become too Canadian to reintegrate again as Australians.  We were in Canada for life.

My reputation grew, my professional life blossomed in the 1980s. My first round as editor in chief of the huge reference textbook, Maxcy-Rosenau Public Health and Preventive Medicine 11th edition, was published to considerable acclaim in 1980; the first edition of the Dictionary of Epidemiology followed in 1983, my second round of Public Health and Preventive Medicine - running to 2000 pages - and the first edition of my solo book, Public Health and Human Ecology, came out in 1985-1986, followed by the second edition of the Dictionary of Epidemiology in 1988; several other reference books, encyclopedia entries, book chapters, original articles, and special  reports for WHO and other agencies and the government of Canada also came out in that productive decade.  In 1987-89 I was President of the American College of Preventive Medicine, the only non-American ever to hold this position; and during this period I served on high-level committees and advisory groups, including one that reported to the US Senate, as well as corresponding groups in Canada.  The most important of these was a panel I chaired for the Royal Society of Canada, which examined the health implications of global climate change. There were several other fascinating assignments in that productive decade, and enough of them flowed on into the 1990s and beyond, to fill another post like this one.  It had been the right decision to stay in Canada, not return to Australia.