Let me call her Mrs McKnight. Doris McKnight. She was a little wisp of a woman, 60ish, nondescript, mousy, soft-spoken when she spoke at all, which was seldom. Her great burly husband spoke for her, barging into my consulting room ahead of her, telling me about her symptoms, usually in a rather patronizing way, belittling her problems, giving her little opportunity to speak for herself. His name was ... no, I'll keep him anonymous. I'll call him Vern. I doubt if he ever read a book in his entire life. Doris made up for this. By the time I met her she'd worked her way through all the classics in the municipal lending library and sometimes diffidently asked for my suggestions about what she should read next. Doris was in pretty good shape. Mild high blood pressure was her only overt reason for seeking medical surveillance, and like so many fair-complexioned Australians, she had some hyperkeratoses on her scalp and arms, the thickened skin spots that are the consequence of a lifetime's exposure to too much ultraviolet radiation, and precursors of skin cancer.
Then Vern died suddenly, probably of a cerebral haemorrhage. He left their affairs in a horrid mess. Doris tidied the paperwork, paid the arrears of income tax, rearranged her home, sold the car that she couldn't drive, turned the garage into a workshop, and set about fulfilling her unrealized dreams, turning these into exquisite reality.
Doris had always wanted to do something with her hands. She began with plasticene but it dries out, crumbles away and loses its shape. She graduated pretty quickly to pottery, and invested in a kiln. She began making little pottery flowers arranged in elegant sprays and wreaths, and decorative abstract figures on teacups and teapots. She spent hours painting these, honing another skill, teaching herself which colours best blended or contrasted with others. Then she graduated to human figures, whimsical leprechauns, demure fairies, lecherous satyrs, naughty little boys and prim school girls. Her irrepressible sense of humour bubbled up around all her figures. She sold them at fairs and the 1950s equivalent of farmers' markets. She did quite well: her little 'human' figures especially commanded very good prices and she was businesslike enough to recognize this, charged appropriately, and, I suspect, didn't bother the tax authorities with details of her cash transactions.
I got to know her in the last 2 or 3 years that I was in practice in Adelaide in the 1950s and regretted leaving the practice more because of her than almost any other patient I cared for. She bloomed late, but luxuriantly, an inspiring example of all that is best about the human spirit.
Friday, November 27, 2015
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
How I edit
In the late 1950s my medical career and my literary life began to merge in pleasing ways -- pleasing to me as a writer, pleasing to readers who fed back to me the fact that the stuff I wrote was easy and even enjoyable to read and was educationally useful. I began to feel that I was doing what I was meant to do with my life. I consciously set about sharpening the skills I was developing. Medical journals were not only hospitable to the stuff I was writing; their editors began to ask me to pass judgement on other people's articles: I became a peer reviewer. That further transformed my life, bringing me into closer contact with the complex problems of scientific editing. I had a mission in life. I began mobilizing my professional expertise and my literary skills to the same worthwhile end.
The next step plunged me into the wonderful world of editing. At the University of Edinburgh, two senior staff members, Reg Pasmore, a physiologist, and Jim Robson, an internal medicine specialist, invited me to edit the 'community medicine' section of the massive multi-volume Companion to Medical Studies they were compiling. This covered everything a medical student needed to know: the basic preclinical subjects, anatomy, biochemistry and physiology, the bridging disciplines, pathology, microbiology, immunology, pharmacology, the clinical sciences, medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, psychiatry, and my specialty, community medicine, or public health. At first I innocently thought my task as a medical editor was to improve the prose in the texts that authors sent to the textbook I was editing: to tighten, clarify the language. I was taken gently in hand by the two editors in chief, who explained my role and responsibilities to me.
'Literary' editing was part of the task but it mattered less than factual correctness. First and foremost, was the text scientifically accurate, truthful, valid? Scientific writing covers a wide spectrum. Almost all scientific writers aim to present the truth as they understand it. They may grasp only part of the truth, may use inappropriate statistical tests to demonstrate that their findings are true, or - rarely - may seek to deliberately deceive readers. The most important quality required of a good editor is possession of a built-in crap-detector. At the far extreme of bad medical science writing is scientific fraud. It is rare but its impact can be devastating because it can do great harm. A scoundrel fabricated false evidence purporting to show that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism. His motive was that he had a financial interest in a company that made a competing vaccine. The fraud was soon exposed, but many otherwise intelligent young parents continue to resist getting their infants immunized against measles, mumps and rubella, and often by extension other preventable infectious diseases because publication of the fraudulent paper in a prestigious medical journal left a permanent memory stain on the vitally important public health procedure of immunizing infants against infectious diseases. Gross fabrication and deliberate fraud are rare but minor examples are common. That is why possession of an effective crap-detector is such an important quality of all editors of scientific books and journals. I'll say more about this in a future post.
Other skills are required when editing scientific books. How and where does the text I am editing fit into the big picture, the entire discipline? Is it concordant or discordant with other parts of the book, other aspects of the body of knowledge in that domain? Are all chapters at the same intellectual and professional level? (Once I had the troublesome task of telling an eminent specialist that his contribution might have been OK in the New York Times Sunday magazine but was below the level required by advanced postgraduates aiming to enter that specialty). Other things editors must detect include plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, i.e. publishing the same chapter in two or more different books. Rather often I sought second and third opinions, inviting other experts to review the MSS submitted by the expert who'd been invited to write the chapter. This is part of the peer review process which is so valued by scientific editors. I discovered that I had a talent for medical editing.
A problem arises in domains of biomedical science where uncertainty persists, for instance about which theory of causation best fits the facts, for example in coronary heart disease; or which treatment regimen is the most likely to control a potentially lethal disease such as breast cancer. In those situations the best approach is to present summaries of each point of view - with supporting factual evidence of course. Pasmore and Robson were fortunate to have in Edinburgh an eminent authority on radiotherapy and an eminent breast surgeon: they were able to offer chapters by both in the Companion to Medical Studies, and leave it to readers to decide. I learnt a great deal from Reg Pasmore and Jim Robson about the art and expertise of editing. The search committee seeking an editor in chief for the massive US reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine evidently had me in the cross-hairs and might have consulted with Reg Pasmore or Jim Robson. Perhaps that's why I, a non-American, was invited to be editor in chief of this fat volume now eponymously known as 'Maxcy-Rosenau-Last' Public Health and Preventive Medicine.
My successful completion of that task established my reputation, and led to other editing tasks, some even more challenging. I edited the Canadian Journal of Public Health for 11 years, Annals of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada for 9 years, networked with editors of other medical journals and learnt a great deal about the unique problems they faced. I got deeply immersed in compiling and editing technical dictionaries, starting with the Dictionary of Epidemiology, which was in many ways the most enjoyable professional work I ever took on. I was co-editor of several other technical reference books, ranging from Stedman's Medical Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of American English, to several encyclopedias, notably the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Public Health. All these tasks, some of them pretty large, occupied the first 12-15 years after I officially retired from the active staff of the University of Ottawa. I am among the most fortunate of people, to have had the opportunity to do such enjoyable and worthwhile jobs over such a long period of my professional life.
The next step plunged me into the wonderful world of editing. At the University of Edinburgh, two senior staff members, Reg Pasmore, a physiologist, and Jim Robson, an internal medicine specialist, invited me to edit the 'community medicine' section of the massive multi-volume Companion to Medical Studies they were compiling. This covered everything a medical student needed to know: the basic preclinical subjects, anatomy, biochemistry and physiology, the bridging disciplines, pathology, microbiology, immunology, pharmacology, the clinical sciences, medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, psychiatry, and my specialty, community medicine, or public health. At first I innocently thought my task as a medical editor was to improve the prose in the texts that authors sent to the textbook I was editing: to tighten, clarify the language. I was taken gently in hand by the two editors in chief, who explained my role and responsibilities to me.
'Literary' editing was part of the task but it mattered less than factual correctness. First and foremost, was the text scientifically accurate, truthful, valid? Scientific writing covers a wide spectrum. Almost all scientific writers aim to present the truth as they understand it. They may grasp only part of the truth, may use inappropriate statistical tests to demonstrate that their findings are true, or - rarely - may seek to deliberately deceive readers. The most important quality required of a good editor is possession of a built-in crap-detector. At the far extreme of bad medical science writing is scientific fraud. It is rare but its impact can be devastating because it can do great harm. A scoundrel fabricated false evidence purporting to show that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism. His motive was that he had a financial interest in a company that made a competing vaccine. The fraud was soon exposed, but many otherwise intelligent young parents continue to resist getting their infants immunized against measles, mumps and rubella, and often by extension other preventable infectious diseases because publication of the fraudulent paper in a prestigious medical journal left a permanent memory stain on the vitally important public health procedure of immunizing infants against infectious diseases. Gross fabrication and deliberate fraud are rare but minor examples are common. That is why possession of an effective crap-detector is such an important quality of all editors of scientific books and journals. I'll say more about this in a future post.
Other skills are required when editing scientific books. How and where does the text I am editing fit into the big picture, the entire discipline? Is it concordant or discordant with other parts of the book, other aspects of the body of knowledge in that domain? Are all chapters at the same intellectual and professional level? (Once I had the troublesome task of telling an eminent specialist that his contribution might have been OK in the New York Times Sunday magazine but was below the level required by advanced postgraduates aiming to enter that specialty). Other things editors must detect include plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, i.e. publishing the same chapter in two or more different books. Rather often I sought second and third opinions, inviting other experts to review the MSS submitted by the expert who'd been invited to write the chapter. This is part of the peer review process which is so valued by scientific editors. I discovered that I had a talent for medical editing.
A problem arises in domains of biomedical science where uncertainty persists, for instance about which theory of causation best fits the facts, for example in coronary heart disease; or which treatment regimen is the most likely to control a potentially lethal disease such as breast cancer. In those situations the best approach is to present summaries of each point of view - with supporting factual evidence of course. Pasmore and Robson were fortunate to have in Edinburgh an eminent authority on radiotherapy and an eminent breast surgeon: they were able to offer chapters by both in the Companion to Medical Studies, and leave it to readers to decide. I learnt a great deal from Reg Pasmore and Jim Robson about the art and expertise of editing. The search committee seeking an editor in chief for the massive US reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine evidently had me in the cross-hairs and might have consulted with Reg Pasmore or Jim Robson. Perhaps that's why I, a non-American, was invited to be editor in chief of this fat volume now eponymously known as 'Maxcy-Rosenau-Last' Public Health and Preventive Medicine.
My successful completion of that task established my reputation, and led to other editing tasks, some even more challenging. I edited the Canadian Journal of Public Health for 11 years, Annals of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada for 9 years, networked with editors of other medical journals and learnt a great deal about the unique problems they faced. I got deeply immersed in compiling and editing technical dictionaries, starting with the Dictionary of Epidemiology, which was in many ways the most enjoyable professional work I ever took on. I was co-editor of several other technical reference books, ranging from Stedman's Medical Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of American English, to several encyclopedias, notably the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Public Health. All these tasks, some of them pretty large, occupied the first 12-15 years after I officially retired from the active staff of the University of Ottawa. I am among the most fortunate of people, to have had the opportunity to do such enjoyable and worthwhile jobs over such a long period of my professional life.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Beatrice and Sidney
I picked up A Victorian Courtship by Jeanne MacKenzie (Oxford: OUP 1979) in the early 1980s, in Oxford after OUP published the first edition of the Dictionary of Epidemiology or in London. I forget which. It vanished in my bookshelves which have an uncanny ability to conceal as well as to reveal books. Happily it survived the ruthless pruning that accompanied our move from a house to an apartment. Its spine caught my eye last week. I opened and began to read it. It's a slim little book, about the courtship of Beatrice Potter, youngest of 9 daughters of a prosperous North Country industrialist, and Sidney Webb, the little Cockney who wooed and won her. They were a power couple I'd love to have known, left of centre intellectual movers and shakers. They founded the London School of Economics and the weekly New Statesman, and were prominent Fabian socialists. Beatrice and Sidney Webb were married for more than 50 years and accomplished an enormous amount of good in Britain and the world. They and their work deserve to be better known by all of us. This book helps to make them better known.
I've often wished for time travel so I could converse with many people I'd love to have known but couldn't because they lived before my time. Mary Wollstonecroft, for instance, and Jane Austen, and Samuel Johnson. Sidney and Beatrice Webb's lives overlapped with mine, so it would have been possible in theory for me to have met them, if I'd gone to London a few years sooner, and moved in the same circles. (Beatrice lived 1858-1943 and Sidney 1859-1947). But I didn't go to London for the first time until 1951, and didn't enter that magical circle of left-wing intellectuals until 1961. Perhaps it bends truth a little to say I 'entered' that magical circle: I was always on the fringe, and the circle had fragmented by the early 1960s. But I knew well, and networked with some of the surviving members throughout the 1960s, first in London then in the second half of the 1960s from my base at the Usher Institute of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. My mentor Jerry Morris was a disciple of the Webbs, and his friend Richard Titmuss at the London School of Economics was their principal apostle. I sat at Titmuss's feet too, and learnt much from him, notably how to reinforce and apply in my own professional life, his (and my) values of equity, altruism and social justice. These were the Webb's values too, of course. I did my best to pass on these values in all my contacts with students, in many of my published papers and in Public Health and Human Ecology, and even managed to smuggle hints into some entries in the Dictionary of Public Health.
Like most young women of her time, Beatrice Potter had no formal education, but was self-taught. Long before the concept was 'invented' as an exciting innovation in medical education, she was applying problem based learning in her work as a rent collector in tenements owned by her family in the slums of East End London. She taught herself sociology, applying the concepts and theories of Herbert Spencer. She worked with Charles and Mary Booth on their monumental study of work and poverty, teaching herself more social science as well as economics and statistics. Sidney Webb too was largely self-taught. When these two scholars met - two student researchers attempting to figure out how society and communities worked, how and why some were 'healthy' and functioned smoothly and successfully while others did not - it was a true marriage of two first class minds in search of solutions to oppressive problems that hampered progress towards a more ideal civilization in late Victorian and Edwardian England.
Beatrice was able to deploy some of her family wealth pursuing research aimed at diagnosing the ills of that society, and poured more of that wealth into the research and educational institution that became the London School of Economics. This occupies a huddle of buildings near the junction of Kingsway, Aldwych and the Fleet Street end of the Strand. (Whenever I was in London in the 1960s, 70s and 80s I used to beat a path to the LSE, specifically to the Economist Book Shop whence I usually staggered away, my briefcase bulging and weighed down with exciting treasure obtainable nowhere else).
Sidney Webb's wooing and winning of Beatrice Potter depended on his letters to her. In those times before telephones became ubiquitous, generations before email, the internet, Facebook and the other fast-track features of life in the early 21st century, communication between two young people who were attracted to each other relied heavily on letters. They weren't all that young, moreover: Beatrice was well into her 30s and Sidney a few months younger. It took a while for them to overcome the constraints of their times, and their letters seem stiff and formal, compared for instance to those between Wendy and me. Nevertheless few exchanges are as captivating as the letters back and forth between Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, judging by the samples in this small book.
Beatrice had at least one really kooky idea (two, if you count the infatuation she shared with Sidney for Soviet Russian communism as practised by Stalin). She believed that women should adopt cigarette smoking as a sign of their equality with men: "Let men beware of the smoking woman. I would urge earnestly on the defenders of Man's supremacy to fight the female use of tobacco with more sternness and vigour than they have deployed in the female use of the vote. It is a far more fatal power. It is the wand with which the possible women of the future will open the hidden stores of knowledge of men and things and learn to govern them. Then will women become the leading doctors, barristers and scientists. And a female Gladstone may lurk in the dim vistas of the future." It's happening and gaining momentum - although she would have deplored Maggie Thatcher and her policies even more than I do!
There's much more I could say about this fascinating couple, especially about Beatrice. I haven't even mentioned her emotional relationship with the powerful statesman Joseph Chamberlain. The Webbs richly merit a biopic. I hope someone at the BBC or elsewhere sees this post and seizes the suggestion.
 |
| Beatrice Potter (1892) shortly before her marriage to Sidney Webb |
 |
| Sidney and Beatrice Webb en route to the Soviet Union, 1932 |
I've often wished for time travel so I could converse with many people I'd love to have known but couldn't because they lived before my time. Mary Wollstonecroft, for instance, and Jane Austen, and Samuel Johnson. Sidney and Beatrice Webb's lives overlapped with mine, so it would have been possible in theory for me to have met them, if I'd gone to London a few years sooner, and moved in the same circles. (Beatrice lived 1858-1943 and Sidney 1859-1947). But I didn't go to London for the first time until 1951, and didn't enter that magical circle of left-wing intellectuals until 1961. Perhaps it bends truth a little to say I 'entered' that magical circle: I was always on the fringe, and the circle had fragmented by the early 1960s. But I knew well, and networked with some of the surviving members throughout the 1960s, first in London then in the second half of the 1960s from my base at the Usher Institute of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. My mentor Jerry Morris was a disciple of the Webbs, and his friend Richard Titmuss at the London School of Economics was their principal apostle. I sat at Titmuss's feet too, and learnt much from him, notably how to reinforce and apply in my own professional life, his (and my) values of equity, altruism and social justice. These were the Webb's values too, of course. I did my best to pass on these values in all my contacts with students, in many of my published papers and in Public Health and Human Ecology, and even managed to smuggle hints into some entries in the Dictionary of Public Health.
Like most young women of her time, Beatrice Potter had no formal education, but was self-taught. Long before the concept was 'invented' as an exciting innovation in medical education, she was applying problem based learning in her work as a rent collector in tenements owned by her family in the slums of East End London. She taught herself sociology, applying the concepts and theories of Herbert Spencer. She worked with Charles and Mary Booth on their monumental study of work and poverty, teaching herself more social science as well as economics and statistics. Sidney Webb too was largely self-taught. When these two scholars met - two student researchers attempting to figure out how society and communities worked, how and why some were 'healthy' and functioned smoothly and successfully while others did not - it was a true marriage of two first class minds in search of solutions to oppressive problems that hampered progress towards a more ideal civilization in late Victorian and Edwardian England.
Beatrice was able to deploy some of her family wealth pursuing research aimed at diagnosing the ills of that society, and poured more of that wealth into the research and educational institution that became the London School of Economics. This occupies a huddle of buildings near the junction of Kingsway, Aldwych and the Fleet Street end of the Strand. (Whenever I was in London in the 1960s, 70s and 80s I used to beat a path to the LSE, specifically to the Economist Book Shop whence I usually staggered away, my briefcase bulging and weighed down with exciting treasure obtainable nowhere else).
Sidney Webb's wooing and winning of Beatrice Potter depended on his letters to her. In those times before telephones became ubiquitous, generations before email, the internet, Facebook and the other fast-track features of life in the early 21st century, communication between two young people who were attracted to each other relied heavily on letters. They weren't all that young, moreover: Beatrice was well into her 30s and Sidney a few months younger. It took a while for them to overcome the constraints of their times, and their letters seem stiff and formal, compared for instance to those between Wendy and me. Nevertheless few exchanges are as captivating as the letters back and forth between Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, judging by the samples in this small book.
Beatrice had at least one really kooky idea (two, if you count the infatuation she shared with Sidney for Soviet Russian communism as practised by Stalin). She believed that women should adopt cigarette smoking as a sign of their equality with men: "Let men beware of the smoking woman. I would urge earnestly on the defenders of Man's supremacy to fight the female use of tobacco with more sternness and vigour than they have deployed in the female use of the vote. It is a far more fatal power. It is the wand with which the possible women of the future will open the hidden stores of knowledge of men and things and learn to govern them. Then will women become the leading doctors, barristers and scientists. And a female Gladstone may lurk in the dim vistas of the future." It's happening and gaining momentum - although she would have deplored Maggie Thatcher and her policies even more than I do!
There's much more I could say about this fascinating couple, especially about Beatrice. I haven't even mentioned her emotional relationship with the powerful statesman Joseph Chamberlain. The Webbs richly merit a biopic. I hope someone at the BBC or elsewhere sees this post and seizes the suggestion.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Equality and equity
As an Australian with Y chromosomes I was born a male chauvinist and remained true to the associated beliefs and values through my school and university years. I believed that males were inherently superior to females in all respects. It was a belief that seemed as immutable as belief in the law of gravity.
Imperceptibly this belief began to be eroded, at first so subtly, so insidiously that I can't date the onset of doubts about the natural superiority of males. In retrospect I think the first onset of doubts may have arisen when I began seeing sick people. One would have to be as thick as two planks to fail to notice that women and girls withstood suffering and sickness, chronic unremitting pain, devastating loss, with courage, phlegmatic calm, philosophical insight, a sense of humour and constructive foresight, rarely equalled by their male consorts. Reluctantly also I had to concede that there were women who could out-perform me on every criterion it's possible to measure. Being married to Wendy played an important role in the slow and steady process of conversion, or enlightenment. I owe to Wendy the erosion and ultimate obliteration of my sense of the natural superiority of males (and the sense of entitlement that accompanied it).
Ultimately hard facts that came to light when I was doing research for the UK Royal Commission on Medical Education in the early 1960s impelled my conversion from male chauvinist to card-carrying feminist. I "came out," so to say, and I had facts and figures to back me up. These were published in one of the papers that summarized the results of meticulous research projects I did with help from Gillian Stanley and others. (Stanley GR, Last JM, "Careers of Young Medical Women." Brit J Med Educ, 1968, 2:204-209, and Appendix 19, Report of Royal Commission on Medical Education. Cmnd 3569; London: HMSO, 1968, pp 320-396).
Conditions have been improving for the female half of the human race since long before the 1960s, although obviously there is a long way to go before we achieve genuine equity between the sexes in all the nations and cultures of the world. Karen Trollope Kumar and I summarized some persistent appalling facts in a background paper for a WHO conference on "Women, Health and the Environment" in Bangkok in 1997. By then it was possible to use official demographic statistics from very large populations in both India and China to reveal the devastating distortion of the naturally occurring sex ratio of male:female births by the selective abortion of female foetuses. That distortion has led to large cohorts of men who have no marital partner, with consequent insoluble social problems.
All of this bad news has been put in a more cheerful, more positive and hopeful perspective by the enlightened actions of Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau. He has selected a cabinet with equal numbers of women and men. (When asked "Why?" he had a simple conversation-stopping answer: "It's 2015!") Today I watched the swearing-in ceremony and was enormously impressed by the range, depth, and diversity of experience of the new cabinet. Collectively they have tremendous potential. If they fulfill only half their promises, it will be a spectacular success. I know and have worked with one member of the new cabinet, Kirsty Duncan PhD, and have great respect for her expertise and ability; she and I were in the vanguard of scientists studying the causes and effects of climate change in the 1980s. She and Catherine McKenna, my local member, new minister for environment and climate change, are safe hands and minds to manage this urgent problem.
Imperceptibly this belief began to be eroded, at first so subtly, so insidiously that I can't date the onset of doubts about the natural superiority of males. In retrospect I think the first onset of doubts may have arisen when I began seeing sick people. One would have to be as thick as two planks to fail to notice that women and girls withstood suffering and sickness, chronic unremitting pain, devastating loss, with courage, phlegmatic calm, philosophical insight, a sense of humour and constructive foresight, rarely equalled by their male consorts. Reluctantly also I had to concede that there were women who could out-perform me on every criterion it's possible to measure. Being married to Wendy played an important role in the slow and steady process of conversion, or enlightenment. I owe to Wendy the erosion and ultimate obliteration of my sense of the natural superiority of males (and the sense of entitlement that accompanied it).
Ultimately hard facts that came to light when I was doing research for the UK Royal Commission on Medical Education in the early 1960s impelled my conversion from male chauvinist to card-carrying feminist. I "came out," so to say, and I had facts and figures to back me up. These were published in one of the papers that summarized the results of meticulous research projects I did with help from Gillian Stanley and others. (Stanley GR, Last JM, "Careers of Young Medical Women." Brit J Med Educ, 1968, 2:204-209, and Appendix 19, Report of Royal Commission on Medical Education. Cmnd 3569; London: HMSO, 1968, pp 320-396).
Conditions have been improving for the female half of the human race since long before the 1960s, although obviously there is a long way to go before we achieve genuine equity between the sexes in all the nations and cultures of the world. Karen Trollope Kumar and I summarized some persistent appalling facts in a background paper for a WHO conference on "Women, Health and the Environment" in Bangkok in 1997. By then it was possible to use official demographic statistics from very large populations in both India and China to reveal the devastating distortion of the naturally occurring sex ratio of male:female births by the selective abortion of female foetuses. That distortion has led to large cohorts of men who have no marital partner, with consequent insoluble social problems.
All of this bad news has been put in a more cheerful, more positive and hopeful perspective by the enlightened actions of Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau. He has selected a cabinet with equal numbers of women and men. (When asked "Why?" he had a simple conversation-stopping answer: "It's 2015!") Today I watched the swearing-in ceremony and was enormously impressed by the range, depth, and diversity of experience of the new cabinet. Collectively they have tremendous potential. If they fulfill only half their promises, it will be a spectacular success. I know and have worked with one member of the new cabinet, Kirsty Duncan PhD, and have great respect for her expertise and ability; she and I were in the vanguard of scientists studying the causes and effects of climate change in the 1980s. She and Catherine McKenna, my local member, new minister for environment and climate change, are safe hands and minds to manage this urgent problem.
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