Another new year

For more than 40 years the Labour Day long weekend has been the watershed event in my calendar, marking the start of a new academic year. In the early 1970s I fell into the habit of using this weekend to review the events of the past year and draw up a list of priorities for the new academic year that began on the first Tuesday after the Monday Labour Day holiday. The highest priorities were my academic responsibilities - teaching commitments, curriculum review and revision, marshalling other members of the teaching team into a coherent group in which each knew what everyone else was doing. The second tier priorities were the research domain, which included my role as principal investigator, team member in multi centre studies, peer reviewer of research proposals, author of articles reporting results of research. As the years passed my role as author and editor of books evolved from a third tier of priorities to take first place, consuming the largest proportion of my waking hours, pushing other intellectual activities lower down in my personal scheme of things. 

The shift in priorities began on Bastille Day 1977 in New York City, that steamy hot day of a massive power outage, when I accepted the role as editor in chief of the massive American reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine, and set about transforming it from what it had been to what it is now. I am pleased and proud that this huge book is now known as Maxcy-Rosenau-Last, after its first and second editors - and me. But my role and involvement ended when the 15th edition was published in 2007. 

John Last and some of the books he's edited or written; the 11th edition
of the big public health textbook is by his right arm

I'm more proud and pleased about my role as compiler and editor of the Dictionary of Epidemiology that took over my life from the early 1980s until 2001 when I handed it over to Miquel Porta in Barcelona (I've stayed on as an associate editor of the 5th and 6th editions). Last time I counted this dictionary had been translated into 15 languages; it's used by epidemiologists all over the world, and at meetings of the IEA  (International Epidemiological Association) as I've said before, I feel a bit like the Eiffel Tower because so many of them  want to be photographed standing next to me. The 6th edition is to be published in 2014 and I expect that my role will come to an end.

John Last with the two dictionaries, at APHA meeting,
Boston 2006

So this Labour Day weekend, like last year's, finds me with a much abbreviated list of priorities. At the beginning of this calendar year I set myself the modest task of licking my memoirs into shape by the end of the year. As readers of this blog know, I've been posting abridged excerpts of my memoirs. I'll probably continue to do this, but my blog is a convenient place to ventilate about whatever happens to be on my mind at a time when I feel like sharing thoughts with the amorphous assortment of blog readers - including those inscrutable Latvians who haven't told me why they hit on my blog.