A festschrift, or celebration of my life

On Thursday May 19, my colleagues and friends assembled to celebrate my life and work. Not only Ottawa University colleagues were there. The event attracted old friends and colleagues from across the pond, Miquel Porta from Barcelona, Raj Bhopal from Edinburgh took their places at the podium to sing my praises. So did Arthur Frank from Philadelphia. 'Scutch' - Doug Scutchfield from Lexington, Kentucky, sent a moving video which I'll try to link to this brief report. Trevor  Hancock flew in, all the way from Victoria BC. Those from nearer home included Karen Trollope Kumar from Hamilton, whom I first got to know, and mentor, when she and her husband Pradeep Kumar ran a network of rural community clinics in the Himalayan foothills near Dehra Dun, Eva Grunfeld from Toronto, Rama Nair and Ian McDowell, my uOttawa friends and colleagues for many years. It was a delightful and moving occasion. I especially liked that the 'formal' proceedings were hijacked twice by former students who wanted to say how I had influenced their lives. (The 'formal' proceedings were quite rightly so relaxed they hardly merit the word 'formal')

The  remarks of all who spoke are preserved in an elegant commemorative book that I'll get next week.  I'll recycle selections from it as a post or posts on this blog.

Here is what I said at the end of the day:

Thank you all for all the kind and wonderful things you’ve said about me.

And special thanks, Mariella Peca and friends, for all your hard work organizing this celebration.

I’ve been described as a ‘living legend’ and as a ‘towering figure’ – this presumably by people who’d not seen me in the flesh. (My daughter Rebecca uses politically correct language to describe me more accurately as ‘vertically challenged.’)

At school I was briefly nicknamed ‘lucky’ Last. I stomped on this: such a nickname was tempting fate; would surely bring bad luck.

Having survived 90 years, I’m not, and never was, superstitious.  But I have had a very lucky life, no doubt about it.

I chose a fortunate birth cohort, the babies born in 1926.  It’s the birth cohort of Fidel Castro, Marilyn  Monroe, Hugh Hefner of Playboy, and our lady sovereign Queen Elizabeth. 

On Sunday September 25 1955, I had my greatest ever stroke of luck. On my way to play golf with three friends, I picked up two young women hitch hikers. I was instantly attracted to one of these hitch hikers: five minutes after we met I made a suggestion that changed both our lives. They were on the wrong road for their intended destination; I should have dropped them at the next cross road.  Instead I abandoned my planned golf game, persuaded them to change their plans for that day, to let me show them some of the beautiful dairy farming and wine growing country south of Adelaide.  By the end of that magical day, after long conversations with the Kiwi called Jan Wendelken, also known as Wendy, I knew she was the maid for me. I’m very, very sad she isn’t here today: she died in 2010 after a brief, not very distressing illness.

Our courtship began with 125 letters, mostly 8, 10, 12 handwritten pages, between October 1955 and May 1956, two or more letters a week, back and forth across the Tasman Sea between Adelaide and Christchurch. We never ran short of things to say.  Then she phoned me – a big deal, a huge deal in 1955, an international phone call – and we agreed that she’d come back to Adelaide, nurse at the Children’s Hospital, while we conducted a more conventional 20^th century courtship.

We married on Saint Valentine’s Day 1957 and had 55 wonderful years of adventurous travel and multiple intercontinental migrations – we lived in Adelaide, Sydney, Adelaide, London, Sydney, Burlington, Vermont, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Ottawa. There was much other travel, many holidays in Europe, trips back to Oz and NZ to visit our families, and working travel for me in Colombia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, and China and Japan as well as many places in UK and Europe.  Also, of course, much travel in Canada and the USA.  At times I virtually commuted back and forth across the Atlantic, to Geneva, Stockholm, London, and Paris.

Our early travels were by sea on freighters carrying 12 passengers – by far the best way to travel long distances across our planet. From 1965 onward, we flew, enduring all the discomforts and anxieties of air travel.

We found enough spare time to produce 3 children, all of whom have interesting, worthwhile lives.

Wendy inspired me, breathed life into all my professional endeavors, encouraged, aided and abetted all my scholarly activities, all the travels. When our kids were grown up, she usually came with me.

I met and networked with the movers and shakers of public health sciences in the English-speaking world and beyond, absorbed ideas from them, occasionally contributed ideas of my own.

Alas, most of those wonderful women and men of public health who were my friends, collaborators and colleagues, have preceded me into the great field study in the sky – have fallen off their perches before me.  That’s one of the penalties one pays for living too long: it can lead to a lonely old age.

I’m best known as a medical writer and editor. I edited 3 editions of the massive public health textbook, eponymously known as Maxcy-Rosenau-Last, and 4 editions of the Dictionary of Epidemiology, as well as a Dictionary of Public Health; and co-edited an Encyclopedia of Public Health. I loved editing, took to it like a duck to water. If there’s a god, it’s what she meant me to do, and I did it with gusto and enthusiasm.

I first got involved in medical writing while still in general practice in Adelaide in the late 1950s. In Sydney in 1962-63, I wrote several chapters and helped to edit a book on child health and determinants of healthy child development.

In Edinburgh, in 1966, Jim Robson and Reg Pasmore invited me to edit the ‘Community Medicine’ chapters in a massive, Edinburgh-based 4-volume textbook, A Companion to Medical Studies. This immersed me in most phases of scientific book production.

In Ottawa I became the Canadian representative on the board of directors of the (US) Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine, and thanks to my track record, a member of the publications committee. In that capacity, I spoke with knowledge and experience about priorities and problems in producing a multi-author textbook. The board of directors thanked me and I came home to Ottawa carefree and happy.

A few weeks later I had a phone call from the chairman of the search committee responsible for finding an editor in chief for the massive American textbook of public health, previously compiled and edited by a team based at the Harvard School of Public Health, then a different team based at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The publishers, conscious of changing times and priorities, wanted to take the book out of schools of public health, place it in medical school departments of preventive medicine who were regarded as more in touch with changing times and new problems.  The publishers, and the search committee, wanted me to be editor in chief. A lot of politics was involved; in my innocence, I was unaware of this until years later, which was just as well for my equanimity and peace of mind.

Reluctantly, and only after I’d refused several times, I agreed to take on this editing task.

The book was a success.  It led to an invitation to carry out a far more enjoyable task, compiling and editing a Dictionary of Epidemiology. There isn’t time to go into details, but I was at the epicentre of a world-wide network of oddball epidemiologists, all of us concerned about precise use of technical terms, the words and phrases used to label the concepts, methods, and procedures of epidemiology.  It was the most fun I’ve ever had with professional work.

The Dictionary of Epidemiology was the most successful book on OUP-USA’s publications list. It’s gone through multiple editions, 4 under my watch and 2 more since, and has been translated into at least 14 other languages. It made my name known to epidemiologists all over the world. At international meetings I feel like the Eiffel Tower: everyone wants their photo taken standing next to me. 

On the day we met, Wendy and I got into a deep discussion about the moral and ethical foundations of nursing and medical practice. We discovered that we shared the same values – values slightly (sometimes a lot) out of sync with prevailing majority views. It gave us something else in common, added to my conviction that Wendy was the maid for me.  As we bonded more closely, our shared values became as one.

Concern for human rights, individual autonomy and freedom of choice balanced by concern for the collective, for society and the community as a whole – indeed for all life on earth as an entity – were ideas we dimly perceived in the 1950s. Our ideas evolved as we matured, although some retreated into subconscious memory for many years, to resurface in the 1980s when I got involved in developing guidelines for ethical conduct of epidemiology and public health. The seeds were sewn in that conversation Wendy and I had over our pie and lemonade lunch on a hillside above Yankalilla Beach, South Australia on September 25, 1955.

Again, my heartfelt thanks to all of you for contributing to this festschrift.

A Celebration

Last Thursday, May 19, my colleagues held a celebration of my life, a sort of mini-festschrift.  I'd been rather dreading this, not because it was yet another marker on the inevitable downward pathway to senescence and oblivion, but because I was embarrassed thinking about what my friends and colleagues might say and do.  I needn't have worried.  It was a thoroughly delightful experience in every way. I was really chuffed that two good friends traveled all the way across the pond for the occasion -- Miquel Porta came from Barcelona, and Raj Bhopal came from Edinburgh. Trevor Hancock came from Victoria, BC, which is about as far away as Barcelona and Edinburgh. 'Scutch' -- Doug Scutchfield, from Lexington, Kentucky -- didn't travel to Ottawa for the event, but did sent a lovely video tribute, which in a way is better because I have a permanent electronic record, which I could post on this blog if I knew how to do it. Mariella Peca, our longtime faithful office manager whom I recruited when she was still in her teens 40 or more years ago, has collected many tributes and is assembling these in a book which I'll see and be able to peruse at leisure next week. I could have had it sooner but I added my thanks and appreciation on the day, which delayed matters a little bit. There are also photographs along with quite a large number of written tributes, I understand. I'm eagerly looking forward to holding the book in my hands and reading it, I hope as soon as this Victoria Day long weekend is over. I put together a few photos myself, in a small Powerpoint slide deck and had this ready to accompany my thanks to everyone at the end of the day. But hardly anyone showed slides.  The event was held in a splendid setting, the Museum of Nature, just a few hundred meters from my condo.  It's a superb setting for an event such as this, but doesn't lend itself well to showing slides. It was catered supremely well, one of the best banquets I've ever attended. That was better than looking at a lot of slides! I'll probably be able to include some photos in the next post on this blog.

Stuff Matters

Stuff Matters is the most interesting, entertaining, educationally enhancing book I've read in a long time. The 'stuff' Mark Miodownik writes about is the often anonymous material we use every day in all manner of ways, and take for granted; but without it, society as we know it, civilization indeed, couldn't function. Steel results from heating iron in the presence of small -- and varying -- amounts of carbon, sometimes subjecting it to being beaten as it cools from a molten or near-molten state.  The Japanese craftsmen who made Samurai swords discovered this empirically thousands of years ago, and so did a few other small, select tribes or clans in various parts of the world. This enabled them to make swords strong enough to vanquish enemies in warfare without their swords shattering as they would have if made merely of cast iron, or softer, more malleable bronze.We use steel in innumerable peaceful ways too of course, most successfully perhaps in the chemin de fer, the iron roads -- rails -- on which our trains run. And of course also to build the bridges, viaducts and earth-moving equipment that smoothes the uneven terrain over which the rails, and the trains, must run.   Concrete, exploited by the Romans and reinforced with iron, made the magnificent dome of the Pantheon temple in Rome, still after 2000 years I think the largest (and surely the most aesthetically lovely) dome in the world. Did you know that concrete results not from the drying-out of a liquid paste of its ingredients, but from the absorption of water into this paste? I didn't, but now this factoid is part of my lifetime accumulation of information. Paper is one of the four great Chinese discoveries, also enormously important, indeed essential to civilization in everything from battle plans to intimate love letters (Mark Miodownik reproduces a love letter from his wife to him, to illustrate this use of paper). The essential ingredient of paper is a paste of cellulose that dries to varying thickness and durability. There was so much I didn't know before I read Stuff Matters. I didn't know that the Shard, the extraordinary glass pinnacle beside Tower bridge in London, is the tallest building in Europe, or that some 3000 people work in it -- it looks smaller in its pictures. I do know that it's the most striking architectural structure of the contemporary London cityscape, the one I'd most like to go back again to London to see for myself. Ah, life's too short: so many things I want to do but can't because my range is increasingly restricted by infirmity and old age.  

Doom and gloom

Where did April go?  It's a sign of advancing age when the days and weeks flash by so quickly that I'm hardly aware of their passing. 

I've been trying to keep a finger on the pulse of world events as they flash by, though goodness knows why I bother: most events reported in the media are so depressing, I would like to escape, as the Soviet newsmakers used to do by reporting only good news -- the output of tractors, the achievements of football teams. I'd prefer not to hear the trumpeting of the deplorable, bombastic ignoramus the Republican party in the USA has selected as its candidate in this year's presidential contest. And contest is a suitable word to describe what is going on, the whole thing is, perhaps quite rightly, being treated by the media as if it were a wrestling match.

As for international affairs, the news out of Syria is alarming and profoundly depressing. I find it incomprehensible that seemingly nothing is being done to restrain the ruthless and murderous regime of Bashir al-Assad. Is this because of President Obama's aversion to getting drawn into yet another Middle East entanglement? It's tempting to bury one's head in the sand, as seemingly are the leaders of the western nations.  

The international news is bad enough, the ecological news -- especially at the global level -- is worse. Global climate change continues relentlessly, destroying vital life-supporting ecosystems, most ominously marine ecosystems, where the consequences are profoundly destructive for terrestrial as well as marine life-support systems. The combination of a seemingly trivial rise in sea temperature and equally imperceptible declining pH -- increasing acidity -- kills coral reefs, which are dying everywhere, and disrupts the growth of every life form that has a calcium-based exoskeleton. 

My birth cohort was indeed a very lucky one. We had the best of all worlds. All those born since the beginning of the new millennium will have a much harder struggle just to survive, let alone to prosper in an increasingly hostile world.  All the dice are loaded against them.  I am sad and very sorry for my grandchildren.