Values and beliefs

A theme that has run through numerous posts on my blog has been aspects of my beliefs and values. For many years I've thought a great deal about these important but intangible matters. The first time I can recall thinking consciously about my own values and being aware of a significant change was when I was doing research for the UK Royal Commission on Medical Education in the late 1960s. Some of the questions in the surveys of medical students and established general practitioners and consultants probed these intangible but important personal attributes, and prompted me to think introspectively about my own beliefs. I've been sweating over a chapter in my memoirs on values and beliefs, trying to find the right way to express my thoughts. This post isn't the place to display a preview of this troublesome chapter but I'll mention a few examples.

When I was a teen ager and a medical student, like many of my classmates I was typical male chauvinist. Until my year, the cohort or graduating class of 1949, there had never been more than one or two women in a class which in those days in Adelaide averaged 30 to 40. There were 60 graduating students in my year, and 15 of them, 25%, were women.  We called them "girls" and resented their presence among us. 

The responses to the RCME survey questions revealed many ways in which women faced greater obstacles than men to pursuing their chosen career. They had to overcome much discouragement by their parents and school teachers, and bias against them by selection committees. To get into medical school they had to be determined, highly motivated, and usually academically superior to their male contemporaries. It's not surprising that women got the largest share of gold medals, prizes and distinctions, and were more likely than the men to graduate with honours. But the surveys of students and graduates from 25 of the 26 medical schools in the UK in 1966 showed that despite their academic superiority, discrimination against women persisted after graduation: women graduates were often passed over for the best internship and residency positions. In addition to the hard facts revealed in survey responses, many women wrote comments that revealed the obstacles and discrimination they faced. My sense of justice and fairness was outraged and easily trumped what remained of my male chauvinism. Almost literally overnight I converted and became a feminist, eager to help correct this uneven playing field and make life more equitable for women doctors. That's a long story I've told more fully in my memoirs, and it illustrates how values can change under the influence of evidence.

Changes in attitudes and values regarding crime and punishment may have responded to other stimuli. As best I recall, my belief in the death penalty for murder and harsh punishment for crimes like rape and sexual assault faded slowly rather than being overturned suddenly, until the last vestiges were dispelled by unequivocal evidence that several alleged murderers had been wrongly convicted.  My tolerance for people of equivocal gender identity was a more slowly developing change. How did this value change come about? I suppose it was influenced by opinion leaders in the media and by evidence that was presented in scientific articles - and personal friendships with gay and lesbian colleagues.  Nowadays I believe that tolerance of gender ambiguities is one of the indicators of a mature civilization, and rejection of the death penalty and other harsh punishments is another. In the USA, intolerance of LGBTQ people is widely prevalent in the right-wing states where gun ownership is part of religious beliefs (along with the obscene distortion of the teaching of Jesus about the virtue of poverty and the evil of wealth: the religious right wing has a strong belief in the 'virtues' of wealth and greed as well as gun ownership). It's easy to get angry about these weird aspects of the American way of life. I won't dwell on this further, just finish by saying that my kids seem grateful that Wendy and I decided to settle in Canada rather than the USA, and resolutely resisted all seductive invitations to move south of the 49th Parallel. I'm still wrestling with the words and phrases needed to express these thoughts tactfully in my memoirs. Professionally my lines of communication almost all flow north-south rather than east-west, I probably still have more American than Canadian friends, I've been president of two American national associations and vice-president of a third one, I've been awarded the highest distinction, the gold medal, of the American Public Health Association, and I've been described as an 'honorary American'; I hope what I've written here doesn't hurt the feelings of my American friends. I am pretty sure most of them share my values anyway: that's why they are my friends.