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