Monday, February 25, 2013
Back to the drawing board
Next weekend is wall-to-wall workshops organized and sponsored by Ottawa Independent Writers, a day on editing and a day on memoir-writing. I probably don't need to learn much more about editing, I might already know more than the expert who is leading the discussion, but I'm sure that I will learn something new. I plan to attend with the expectation of learning enough new things to make the day worth while. The day on memoir writing is a different matter. As regular readers of this blog know, I've posted quite a lot of abridged excerpts of memoirs that I began to write a quarter of a century ago. I've written my life story in chronological order, but lately I've had second thoughts about such a conventional, stereotyped approach. Instead in my most recent revision I've begun with the life-changing event, the day I met my beloved Janet Wendy. I'm not yet happy about my composition. I've tried out several attempts in posts on this blog, and several others that have remained private. I'm sure I'll get it right eventually but I don't feel that I'm quite there yet. It's great fun trying though, so I'll keep trying, and probably I'll post on this blog some of my future attempts to get it right. There have been several other life-changing events or episodes in my family's life story, and it may make sense to write at some length about each of these, then fill in briefly, sketchily, the spaces in between. That's what I hope to get some guidance on next weekend. No doubt I'll return to this topic with further remarks after next weekend.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Wedding Anniversary
Today would have been our 56th wedding anniversary if Wendy still lived. I can best commemorate it by posting a few photos:
 |
| In the garden, 238 Melbourne Street, North Adelaide, 14 February 1957 |
 |
| Cutting the wedding cake |
 |
| In the back garden, 5 Greenbank Crescent, Edinburgh, Scotland, Summer 1969 |
 |
| Janet Wendy's Birthday, 14 October 2001 |
 |
| Golden Wedding 14 February 2007 |
 |
| 30th wedding anniversary, Sydney, NSW, 1987 |
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Mentors, advisers, and others
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines mentor as an experienced and trusted adviser or guide. In Homer's Odyssey, Mentor was tutor to the youthful Telemachus, son of Odysseus. Having been very effectively mentored as described in my previous post, I became mentor to occasional medical students in a series of relationships. The longest-lasting of these dates back 40 years and it has evolved into a collegial friendship. I'll consider the mentor's perspective later, but first there is more to say about my perspective as a receptor.
The relationship to a mentor is usually long-lasting and can evolve into a two-way mutually beneficial friendship with emotional bonding and social, cultural interactions. In addition to a handful of mentors, I've had wagon-loads of advisers, some ephemeral, some for long periods, occasionally years. I like to think that I am always receptive when I ask for advice, and often even when the advice is unsolicited. Whence comes this advice? Just about anywhere: colleagues, peers, those higher up the food chain than I, and those who are lower. Looking back over a long lifetime I can't recall many occasions when the advice or suggestions were inappropriate, wrong, or unwise; and only one or two that were malicious or ill-intentioned. That came from a pair of militant feminists when I was a newly appointed department head. It never occurred to me that colleagues in whom I had placed my trust would deliberately set out to betray my trust, but in retrospect I saw that it had been a useful experience because it made me aware that even in the ivory tower of academia there are people motivated by malice rather than good will towards their colleagues. Over the course of half a century in academia I've observed malicious motives at work no more than a small handful of times, and my own career has been almost entirely free of such unsavoury influences. On the other, the good side of the ledger, there must have been hundreds of times when good and wise advice has helped to steer me towards right decisions and desirable outcomes. A good example appears in the Acknowledgements in the Front Matter of the second edition of my book, Public Health and Human Ecology. The names listed there are those of people whom I was able to identify, whose advice, suggestions, or responses to specific requests, helped made that a better book than it would otherwise have been. Similar lists of names appear in the Front Matter of other books that carry my name on the title page. I assembled a list of names of people and organizations to thank when I prepared annual reports of departmental activities for the Dean of the medical school, during the years that I was head of the department, but someone deleted this paragraph when the reports were printed - I suppose in the interests of uniformity because other department heads hadn't provided comparable data. What these data show is the fact that the quest for excellence is a collegial, collaborative activity, in which team work of a very high order is a sine qua non.
The relationship to a mentor is usually long-lasting and can evolve into a two-way mutually beneficial friendship with emotional bonding and social, cultural interactions. In addition to a handful of mentors, I've had wagon-loads of advisers, some ephemeral, some for long periods, occasionally years. I like to think that I am always receptive when I ask for advice, and often even when the advice is unsolicited. Whence comes this advice? Just about anywhere: colleagues, peers, those higher up the food chain than I, and those who are lower. Looking back over a long lifetime I can't recall many occasions when the advice or suggestions were inappropriate, wrong, or unwise; and only one or two that were malicious or ill-intentioned. That came from a pair of militant feminists when I was a newly appointed department head. It never occurred to me that colleagues in whom I had placed my trust would deliberately set out to betray my trust, but in retrospect I saw that it had been a useful experience because it made me aware that even in the ivory tower of academia there are people motivated by malice rather than good will towards their colleagues. Over the course of half a century in academia I've observed malicious motives at work no more than a small handful of times, and my own career has been almost entirely free of such unsavoury influences. On the other, the good side of the ledger, there must have been hundreds of times when good and wise advice has helped to steer me towards right decisions and desirable outcomes. A good example appears in the Acknowledgements in the Front Matter of the second edition of my book, Public Health and Human Ecology. The names listed there are those of people whom I was able to identify, whose advice, suggestions, or responses to specific requests, helped made that a better book than it would otherwise have been. Similar lists of names appear in the Front Matter of other books that carry my name on the title page. I assembled a list of names of people and organizations to thank when I prepared annual reports of departmental activities for the Dean of the medical school, during the years that I was head of the department, but someone deleted this paragraph when the reports were printed - I suppose in the interests of uniformity because other department heads hadn't provided comparable data. What these data show is the fact that the quest for excellence is a collegial, collaborative activity, in which team work of a very high order is a sine qua non.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Mentors and other career-shaping influences
Judged by conventional criteria I've had a productive and successful career. Once I had decided what I wanted to do - a collective, collaborative decision shared with my beloved Wendy - I had to decide, we had to decide, where I would work and with whom, and what aspects of the work would get highest priority. Chance and good luck played a part in this early in my career, along with willingness to take chances and to seize opportunities. My motto could have been carpe diem, seize the day. Looking back over the trajectory of my lifetime career, I can identify half a dozen or more critically important diems that I carped. I've mentioned a few in earlier posts on this blog and and I'll examine these and others in the future. Today I want to focus on a few mentors who helped by steering me in the most favourable directions.
I've been especially fortunate in my choices of mentors on several occasions. At other times I've had support and encouragement from colleagues, usually my seniors, who were not mentors but nevertheless gave me good advice at times when I needed it.
This first happened during my last two years or so in the Western Clinic, the 10-partner group practice in which I was the newly recruited most junior partner. Clarrie Rieger, one of the most senior partners, a surgeon whom I'd first met when he'd been one of my teachers in medical school, was an eminent medical politician, president of the Australian Medical Association, negotiating with the federal government about conditions and fee for service payments in the tax-supported medical benefits system that had begun to take over from private insurance as the way to finance medical and hospital care in Australia. He wanted to groom me as future medical politician, a societal role for which I had no taste at all; but through him I met and interacted with senior medical politicians throughout Australia. I respected and liked almost all of these men - they were all men, not a woman among them in those days - and they liked me. Several gave me good advice as I was making the transition from private practice to salaried academic life and work. At that vitally important decision node in my professional life and in our family's life (Wendy and I had two toddler children by then, Rebecca 3, almost 4, and David 15 months younger) I had helpful suggestions also from Norrie Robson, recently appointed professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide.
In my time there, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney was not a stimulating academic centre; it was intellectually moribund. For the greater part I set my own goals, wrote my own study programs and got a great deal out of my time there. By aggressively challenging two or three senior staff members I managed to get more out of my interactions with them than anyone ever previously had managed to do. I also made intellectually valuable contacts elsewhere in Sydney, notably with David Madison, professor of psychiatry who mentored me as I set about learning psychiatry; Ron Winton, editor of the Medical Journal of Australia; Ian Maddocks who came closest to practising social medicine; and several of the movers and shakers in the nascent College of General Practitioners.
Towards the end of my time in general practice I read an article in the British Medical Journal on "Uses of Epidemiology" by Professor J N Morris, and then I read his small book with the same title. This article and his book which expanded his ideas changed my life. I wrote to Jerry Morris to explore the possibility of working with him in the Medical Research Council's Social Medicine Research Unit. I got a modest traveling fellowship from the Australian Postgraduate Medical Federation which covered the cost of my travel from Australia to London and paid a stipend intended for a single man for six months. I finagled this into almost 12 months - the most mind-expanding year of my life - and Jerry Morris became my first real mentor. I learnt more from him in that year than I'd learnt in all my previous educational experiences, not just about epidemiology but also about other public health sciences. During that year I met almost all the stars in the firmament of British Social Medicine and became friends with all of them. Jerry was the son of a rabbi in Gorbals, the Glasgow slum. He never lost his Glasgow working class accent, or the iconoclastic attitudes that went with it. He was a marvellous mentor and implanted in me for life his critical, sceptical, evidence-based approach to epidemiology and the other public health sciences that relate to it.
I had a second mentor in the Social Medicine Research Unit: John Lee, a tall, plump man with a loud laugh, whose main interests at that time were the cause or causes of an uptick in death rates from many unrelated conditions around the time of adolescence, and the biological as well as epidemiological determinants of cancer. I learnt a great deal about ways to collect and display evidence to the best advantage from John Lee.
My predecessor as a visiting fellow in the Social Medicine Research Unit had been Kerr L White, MD, a Canadian who had moved to the USA and was head of the department of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Vermont at the time our lives first intersected. He became my next important mentor. I learnt much from him when I worked under his supervision at the University of Vermont for a year in 1964-65; and after that he intervened in my life at several critically important times with attractive career opportunities, always accompanied by wise counsel. Kerr White is exactly 10 years older than I, so he would be 96 if he still lives - as I think he must because I'd have heard if he had died. I know his father lived to a great age, so Kerr is probably following a similar genetic pathway. His most important influence on my life and career came when as president of the International Epidemiological Association he selected me to compile and edit the Dictionary of Epidemiology. Many of our peers regard Kerr White as a cold, aloof man. This was never my perception, or Wendy's. He admired Wendy's unwavering support for me, and my dedication to my family and to my career, and both Kerr and his wife Isobel showed great kindness to all my family.
Many other people have played prominent roles in shaping my career, but this is enough for now. I'll have more to say about some of those others in future posts on this blog.
I've been especially fortunate in my choices of mentors on several occasions. At other times I've had support and encouragement from colleagues, usually my seniors, who were not mentors but nevertheless gave me good advice at times when I needed it.
This first happened during my last two years or so in the Western Clinic, the 10-partner group practice in which I was the newly recruited most junior partner. Clarrie Rieger, one of the most senior partners, a surgeon whom I'd first met when he'd been one of my teachers in medical school, was an eminent medical politician, president of the Australian Medical Association, negotiating with the federal government about conditions and fee for service payments in the tax-supported medical benefits system that had begun to take over from private insurance as the way to finance medical and hospital care in Australia. He wanted to groom me as future medical politician, a societal role for which I had no taste at all; but through him I met and interacted with senior medical politicians throughout Australia. I respected and liked almost all of these men - they were all men, not a woman among them in those days - and they liked me. Several gave me good advice as I was making the transition from private practice to salaried academic life and work. At that vitally important decision node in my professional life and in our family's life (Wendy and I had two toddler children by then, Rebecca 3, almost 4, and David 15 months younger) I had helpful suggestions also from Norrie Robson, recently appointed professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide.
In my time there, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney was not a stimulating academic centre; it was intellectually moribund. For the greater part I set my own goals, wrote my own study programs and got a great deal out of my time there. By aggressively challenging two or three senior staff members I managed to get more out of my interactions with them than anyone ever previously had managed to do. I also made intellectually valuable contacts elsewhere in Sydney, notably with David Madison, professor of psychiatry who mentored me as I set about learning psychiatry; Ron Winton, editor of the Medical Journal of Australia; Ian Maddocks who came closest to practising social medicine; and several of the movers and shakers in the nascent College of General Practitioners.
Towards the end of my time in general practice I read an article in the British Medical Journal on "Uses of Epidemiology" by Professor J N Morris, and then I read his small book with the same title. This article and his book which expanded his ideas changed my life. I wrote to Jerry Morris to explore the possibility of working with him in the Medical Research Council's Social Medicine Research Unit. I got a modest traveling fellowship from the Australian Postgraduate Medical Federation which covered the cost of my travel from Australia to London and paid a stipend intended for a single man for six months. I finagled this into almost 12 months - the most mind-expanding year of my life - and Jerry Morris became my first real mentor. I learnt more from him in that year than I'd learnt in all my previous educational experiences, not just about epidemiology but also about other public health sciences. During that year I met almost all the stars in the firmament of British Social Medicine and became friends with all of them. Jerry was the son of a rabbi in Gorbals, the Glasgow slum. He never lost his Glasgow working class accent, or the iconoclastic attitudes that went with it. He was a marvellous mentor and implanted in me for life his critical, sceptical, evidence-based approach to epidemiology and the other public health sciences that relate to it.
 |
| John Lee, Stuart Morrison, Jerry Morris, at the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit, December 1961. All three played important parts in shaping my career |
I had a second mentor in the Social Medicine Research Unit: John Lee, a tall, plump man with a loud laugh, whose main interests at that time were the cause or causes of an uptick in death rates from many unrelated conditions around the time of adolescence, and the biological as well as epidemiological determinants of cancer. I learnt a great deal about ways to collect and display evidence to the best advantage from John Lee.
My predecessor as a visiting fellow in the Social Medicine Research Unit had been Kerr L White, MD, a Canadian who had moved to the USA and was head of the department of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Vermont at the time our lives first intersected. He became my next important mentor. I learnt much from him when I worked under his supervision at the University of Vermont for a year in 1964-65; and after that he intervened in my life at several critically important times with attractive career opportunities, always accompanied by wise counsel. Kerr White is exactly 10 years older than I, so he would be 96 if he still lives - as I think he must because I'd have heard if he had died. I know his father lived to a great age, so Kerr is probably following a similar genetic pathway. His most important influence on my life and career came when as president of the International Epidemiological Association he selected me to compile and edit the Dictionary of Epidemiology. Many of our peers regard Kerr White as a cold, aloof man. This was never my perception, or Wendy's. He admired Wendy's unwavering support for me, and my dedication to my family and to my career, and both Kerr and his wife Isobel showed great kindness to all my family.
Many other people have played prominent roles in shaping my career, but this is enough for now. I'll have more to say about some of those others in future posts on this blog.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)