An epistolary courtship

Rereading the letters that Wendy and I wrote to each other in 1955-56 is a splendid escape from the humdrum present into a magical past. We exchanged letters about once a week on average when we began - apart from the 3-week hiatus Wendy complained about, that was due  to an epidemic of upper respiratory infections which had all of us in the Western Clinic running off our feet. By April 1956 we were writing to each other twice a week or even more often. 

On November 28, 1955, a summery evening made for romantic thoughts and words, I wrote: "Perhaps I am foolish to use such a night for writing words, a far more permanent and irrevocable way of saying things that may be ill-considered. I am still brooding, as I will until I see you again, about Distance and Enchantment. Men have always idealized their women, that they may better idolize them. If I don't take care I will do that to you and the half-remembered  fragments of your personality... may be unrecognizable alongside the reality. Yet I don't think so. What you have had to say in the letters I have had from you has only confirmed my convictions."  Wendy wrote on December 4, before she received this: "It is such a wonderful day I feel I must share it with you. How I wish you could be here, with leisure to enjoy... I have been thinking so much about you that I feel, as I have twice as much spare time as you have, it is only fair that I should write to you when the spirit moves me, and not wait each time for your reply. In that way you will have a better chance of getting to know me." I remember well how my spirits were lifted the first time I read this - it was a pretty clear indication that she was interested in me, perhaps not far from being as interested as I was in her. Perhaps I'll post extensive excerpts later.

Over the next few months as our friendship blossomed, our letters back and forth across the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia often ran to 6, 8 or 10 pages, and soon became more affectionate, despite that cautionary note in Jan Wendy's second letter to me, which I quoted in my last post.  By early April 1956 she had become Dearest Wendy, although she, more restrained than I, still addressed me as My Dear John. We were excited about her impending flight from Christchurch to Melbourne. She phoned me on the first Saturday in April 1956 - my letter written immediately after we hung up is the only undated letter in the collection, and the date of the postmark is illegible. That letter and Wendy's written the same weekend crossed each other, as many of our letters were doing by then, because we each wrote often, sometimes several times a week.  We never ran out of things to say to each other.  

Louise Zuhrer was working in Melbourne when Wendy's flight from Christchurch arrived, and I took her with me to the airport. In my letter of May 28 I wrote: I'd like to have you to myself when you step off the plane but for your sake, to spare you any awkwardness or  embarrassment, it would be better for Louise to be there too."  Louise's presence might have inhibited me slightly: if she had not been beside me when Wendy came out of the door from Customs and Immigration I might have tried to sweep Wendy into my arms, with goodness knows what sort of reaction. As it was I well remember that Wendy and I gazed at each other, but then, and all the way back to Adelaide in my little Morris Minor, we talked, talked nonstop. We had so much to say to each other! As we came through the Adelaide Hills and saw the city below us on the plains between the foothills and the sea, I put my arm around her, and watched as she broke out in an urticarial rash, like hives. For a horrified microsecond I wondered if she was allergic to me, but realized it was a blush that extended beyond her face. We got used to it as our courtship advanced. Her "Pash-rash" as we called it.  It persisted into the first few months of our married life.

The Jan Wendelken-John Last correspondence, 1955-56

Janet Wendelken and John Last's letters, November 1955-June 1956

For months I hunted vainly high and low for the box that contained the letters Wendy and I wrote to each other after the fateful day of our first meeting. At last I asked Jonathan to get some of the boxes down from the shelves in our basement locker and there, finally, we found this precious treasure trove. I haven't counted but the photo tells eloquently that it was a rather prolific exchange of letters. (we wrote at least 125 letters to each other between October 18 1955 and May 31 1956)

I have spent many happy hours during this holiday weekend, rereading the first dozen or so letters in the increasingly affectionate, even amorous exchange. Amorous at my end anyway; Wendy was more cautious, more restrained.  Even so, she could not altogether hide her feelings.  

My first letter to Wendy, timed to welcome her home, revealed a little of the emotional impact on me of meeting her:

“I have thought of you often in the last few weeks… That was… one of the happiest days I can remember, not because it took me back to the carefree days of my own vagabondage, nor because it was such an ideal day to go wandering in the country, but because you and Louise (especially you) were two of the most delightful and charming girls I have ever met.  I am deeply thankful for the odd way of chance, or fate, that took me along that rather out of the way route to the golf links just at the moment you were waiting for some kind stranger to pass by.  I wish you didn’t live so far away though!  I’d dearly love to see more of you, get to know you a whole lot better than was possible in a day.”

Wendy wrote her first letter to me on the ship that took her from Sydney to Wellington so it was her second and third letters that contained her reactions to what I’d written:

“How very sweet of you to have a welcome home letter waiting for me... “  But she went on to show more caution and restraint in her letters, although paradoxically complaining in her third letter that she’d waited a long time to hear again from me:

“For three weeks I have been eagerly scanning the letter rack and I had convinced myself that our correspondence had died a natural death….  It makes me so happy to hear from you …” But she went on to say “I mistrust swiftly moving events … and any sentimental or romantic thoughts, however sweet to hear, mustn’t spoil our relationship at present.”

Nevertheless I couldn’t, didn’t even try to suppress the affection I felt, affection that grew stronger as her letters eloquently displayed her command of language, her intellect, her empathy for others, and most important, her irrepressible affection for me.

As our correspondence evolved we both grew less restrained in our expressions of affection. By the time she decided to come back to Australia our affection for each other was open for all to see, although both of us proceeded slowly, cautiously in our first overt displays of affection for each other.

In March 1956, after Wendy had decided to come back to Adelaide, she sent me more photos of herself including this one. She apologized for not having a glamorous bathing-suit photo, but this one enhanced my ardour and impatience to see her again.

Richard Doll

Soon after I started at the Medical Research Council's Social Medicine Research Unit in 1961, Dr. Joan Faulkner, secretary of the MRC, came by on a visit. She asked me why I’d moved from family doctoring to epidemiology and obviously approved of my career plans. Afterwards, my colleagues told me that this unassuming women not only had considerable power and influence as MRC secretary, she was Richard Doll’s partner. At the time they had only recently married – they had to wait until her divorce from the disreputable Faulkner had been finalized. Joan Faulkner was a frequent visitor to the SMRU. Years later she told me that one reason for her visits was that she felt ideologically ‘at home’ – all but 1 or 2 of us were left of centre, some considerably so. Joan also acted as conduit between the SMRU and the Statistical Research Unit where Richard worked with Austin Bradford Hill, leading the team that was already famous for its work on carcinogenic consequences of tobacco use. 

Richard Doll, about 1995

 In September 1961 Joan Faulkner introduced me to Richard Doll at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Medicine. My first impression of  an effete Brit  with an upper class drawl was rapidly changed by what he said. He had a tremendous array of facts to support his arguments for a more equitable distribution of the nation’s resources.  He was a member of the Communist Party from his student days until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia. At the SSM banquet, Richard and Joan entertained all of us with their witty impressions of American life and “culture” – among other things they quoted from a large collection of lapel buttons, political support buttons of course, and many they had acquired at a shop in Times Square with slogans such as “Save water; shower with a friend” and “Be Alert; the world needs more lerts.”

I met Richard again at the IEA meeting in Princeton New Jersey in the summer of 1964, when he listened with approval while I told a small group of American and British epidemiologists why Wendy and I were moving back to the UK, to the Usher Institute of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, rather than taking a higher-paying job with Kerr White at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore.

Joan and Richard Doll, Carol Buck

In 1973 many distinguished guests helped to celebrate the opening of the medical school at the University of Calgary.  The following week at the annual meeting of the Canadian Public Health Association in Edmonton, I took this photo of Joan and Richard Doll with the Canadian epidemiologist Carol Buck, who was head of the department of epidemiology at Western University in London, Ontario.  We all came back to Ottawa where Joan and Richard Doll stayed with us.  By this time he was Sir Richard and she was Lady Joan.  This didn’t faze Wendy in the least: she had Joan shucking strawberries in our kitchen when one of our rather pretentious neighbours, eager to meet these British aristocrats, invited herself over to be introduced.  I didn’t tell her until the following week that Richard had been an active member of the Communist Party most of his life and remained committed to the socialist cause.  

A few years later the Dolls returned the hospitality when I stayed with them at their home in Oxford. I saw them quite often after that. At the IEA meeting in Florence in 2004 the local host Rodolfo Saracci was a friend of both the Dolls and me, and a highlight of the meeting was a conducted tour of Palazzo della Signori led by a friend of Rodolfo who happened to be mayor of Florence at the time. Another highlight was the banquet, held at a mediaeval castle high in the hills overlooking Florence on a lovely warm evening. We got there on a fleet of tour buses and on the drive back to Florence after the banquet I sat with Joan and Richard Doll. They had been distressed by a personal attack on Richard by enemies who accused him of falsely testifying about the absence of evidence for carcinogenic effects of certain chemicals. I agree with Richard and Joan - and Richard's biographer - that there was in fact no convincing evidence of carcinogenicity of the chemicals in question, that the accusation was without foundation. Richard was a rigorous scientist who relied on thoroughly validated scientific evidence.  Without question he was among the greatest medical scientists of the 20th century and I am proud to be able to say he and his wife Joan were personal friends of Wendy and me.  

Lester Breslow

Continuing with reminiscences about mentors and other eminent people I've encountered in my life, here are some remarks about the delightful man who was the undisputed intellectual, philosophical and moral leader of public health science and practice in the USA throughout the second half of the 20th century, Lester Breslow.

Lester Breslow, c. 1980

In 1961 while I was a visiting scholar in the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit in London, I first met Lester Breslow.  Among many kind acts, Jerry Morris took me to a weekend workshop on the epidemiology and prevention of coronary heart disease, held at St John’s College, Oxford.  One of my recollections of the weekend is that bells chiming the quarter hour at every Oxford college within earshot kept me awake all night.  I was introduced to Lester again a few years later by my mentor at the time, Kerr White. Lester said we’d met before, at the workshop on coronary heart disease in Oxford.  It was a good illustration of his prodigious memory.  

Not long after we moved to Ottawa late in 1969, I first visited Los Angeles. My father was a visiting professor of anatomy for a few months, there for the first or second time in what turned out to be annual 4-month visits that continued until 1986. On the door of the office next but one to my father’s was Lester Breslow’s name. He was the professor of social medicine in UCLA medical school, former dean of UCLA School of Public Health, a very eminent, widely known and admired leader of thought and opinion about public health.  I met him again and his wife Devra at the home of Milton and Ruth Roemer, whom Wendy and I had met in New Zealand when we were there in 1970 for Jonathan’s open heart surgery and I was briefly a visiting professor in Otago University medical school. The Roemers were extremely kind to Wendy and me at that stressful time, the beginning of a warm friendship; our friendship with Lester and Devra Breslow also began in the early 1970s and quickly matured, providing additional incentive to visit Los Angeles.  

Lester soon had an avuncular relationship to me, not just professional and interpersonal but perhaps something more. He had quite a striking resemblance to my real Uncle Lester who would have been 30-40 years his senior. The resemblance was not only physical: their mannerisms and gestures too were similar, as were their values – the values of liberal intellectual Jews. They had roots in the same part of Europe, near the south-east corner of the Baltic in what is now Lithuania or northern Germany. 

I got to know Lester much better when I was appointed editor in chief of the huge reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine eponymously known as Maxcy-Rosenau, after its first two editors. I had taken on this task reluctantly and with misgivings. I felt intimidated by the thought of holding my own, a brash, callow Australian thrust into undeserved leadership of an attempt to restore this venerable American classic to its position as the source of authoritative information about all aspects of public health science and practice.  Lester was a member of the advisory board I selected to support me, and he gave me a tremendous amount of encouragement and help. I had a vision of what the book needed to be, and shared this vision with a few trusted friends and colleagues, one of whom was Lester.  He reassured me with his calm words and accompanying body language that he approved of all I was planning to do.  About 25 years later when he was interviewed for the series called “Voices” – dialogues with prominent epidemiologists – that appear from time to time in the journal Epidemiology, his response to the question about important epidemiologists paid me an extraordinary and I think undeserved compliment

Here is what Lester said about me; ‘CB’ was the interviewer:

CB: Who would you regard as some of the most important epidemiologists during your lifetime?

LB: Two of the people I would mention would be Richard Doll and John Last. I think they have had a tremendous influence on epidemiology, both in methods and in substance. Richard Doll has been a leader in the identification and documentation of cigarette smoke as a major cause of lung cancer. In recent years, he has devoted substantial energy and time to assuring that the results of that epidemiology are implemented. For example, he has been quite prominent in participating in trials that have established methods other than epidemiologic (legal methods, for example) that we need to do something about [cigarette smoking]. He has done other work, some of which I have even criticized, but I certainly think that he is one of the outstanding epidemiologists of the world and in my generation.

John Last has been much more of a leader in methodology and in standardizing epidemiology. He has made a tremendous contribution with his dictionary, and beyond that, he is a prolific writer. I regard those 2 as being outstanding.

Surely he was confusing me with someone else! I’m proud of concepts I’ve identified and described but I’ve never been a methodologist.  All the same it’s very flattering to be named at all by someone of Lester Breslow’s stature, and especially so in the company of Richard Doll.

Lester Breslow with great grand-daughter
Ayelet, in 2005

Wendy and I became good friends with the Breslows in the last quarter century of Lester’s life. We visited them in Los Angeles and our paths crossed at many international meetings, especially those of the IEA – the International Epidemiological Association. Lester had a long, productive life, intellectually active to the end, which came in his late 90s – another example of the fact that epidemiologists have long lives. He clearly enjoyed life to the fullest extent possible. He was a lovely man. I am very happy to have been able to count him among my good friends.

 

Lester and Devra Breslow a few weeks before his death  in 2012

I agree with him about Richard Doll.  In a future post I’ll discuss Richard Doll and his wife Joan Faulkner