Taking stock

Looking back over a long life I continue to be thankful that I've lived through such an exciting era of discoveries and improvements to the human condition. But it's also been a time of bloody wars in which increasing proportions of those killed and maimed have been infants, small children, and the elderly -- innocent bystanders. We face huge environmental challenges, notably from climate change. The UN Conference in Paris offers hope, if the world's nations and their leaders keep their promises.

Forget gloom and doom. It's the first day of a new year, a time for optimism, time to reflect on all the good things that have happened in my lifetime. I summarized the medical and health-related good things in the Epilogue to the second edition of my book, Public Health and Human Ecology (1997). We can prevent or cure many diseases that were invariably fatal when I was a medical student almost 70 years ago. Financial barriers between sick people and the care they need have been obliterated in most advanced nations. Even in the USA where fierce resistance to tax-supported medical care persists, the barriers have been reduced. The medical profession which was almost exclusively restricted to white men in suits until almost half a century ago, has been feminized and has become culturally diverse; students are admitted to medical school on the basis of talent, not connections to the rich and powerful. Perhaps related to this new diversity, there is increasing concern about the moral and ethical foundations of the health care system. I view this with particular interest.  Of my various contributions to advances of medical science and practice in my lifetime, I am especially pleased and proud about this. 

Beyond medical practice and its scholarly aspects wherein I've spent the past half century and more, advances and changes for the better are even more spectacular. The device I use to tap out these posts on my blog is an excellent example. When I post it, it instantly enters the public domain, and the facts about readers that I glance at occasionally, tell me the readers reside all over the world. (This fact pleases me immensely. Occasionally I get feedback from readers and this pleases me even more, especially when they disagree with my dogmatic statements). So I am grateful for the spectacular advances in information technology in recent years. Faxes and photocopiers were briefly exciting but soon superseded by email, scanning, Skype, and the mysterious cloud about which I'm still  mildly suspicious. What will come next, I wonder? Holograms, 3-dimensional facsimiles? Smellograms? The "Feelies" that Aldous Huxley creepily mentioned in Brave New World? Or  something as incomprehensible to me, and as unpredictable, as the first photocopiers were when I saw them in 1960. 

Air travel has improved too, despite the discontents of heightened security, inedible plasticized food, being herded like cattle in abattoirs (a deliberately unsettling simile) and airline schedules that are often a suggestion rather than a factual statement. David and Desre left Sydney on New Years Eve and thanks to longer-haul intercontinental aircraft than in 2006 when Wendy and I last flew that route, and the International Date Line, arrived in Vancouver before they'd left Sydney. The 747 on which Wendy and I flew in 2006 had to refuel in Honolulu, which meant undergoing the torture and endurance trials of Homeland Security for a couple hours in the middle of the local night when we were worse afflicted by jet lag than any other time in my memory. 

Some advances in technology haven't yet entirely caught up with each other. For instance, CBC hasn't resolved the issue of content between its on-air channels. Yes, I'm aware of the great variety available on line, but even with a top-of-the-line iMac I'm reluctant to load one part of it with opera or classical music while I type my literary masterpieces (or whatever they are) on another part. The better, pragmatic reason  for reluctance is that the avaricious accountants in Bell Canada would charge an arm and leg and several pounds of flesh for the doubtful privilege of listening to the obscure opera their scholarly announcers seem to enjoy. I've gone back a few "generations" in music technology, back beyond on-line on-demand music, beyond CDs, to vinyl LPs.  I'm so happy I kept my collection of LPs, despite the temptation to put them out in a garage sale. I have classical music, opera, jazz, blues, and voice recordings, some quite rare and hard to get, perhaps not obtainable at all now.  I had to invest in a new turntable, which has a CD player and USB drive slot as well as the hardware to play my beloved LPs. My cup doesn't quite runneth over: I need to wire it up to a pair of auxilliary speakers. When I've done this, my turntable -- old technology to be sure -- might turn out to be the best investment I've made for many years.

I could go on. There's much more. But you get the picture. Happy New Year, Felice anno nuovo, et cetera.