Monday, February 25, 2013
Back to the drawing board
Next weekend is wall-to-wall workshops organized and sponsored by Ottawa Independent Writers, a day on editing and a day on memoir-writing. I probably don't need to learn much more about editing, I might already know more than the expert who is leading the discussion, but I'm sure that I will learn something new. I plan to attend with the expectation of learning enough new things to make the day worth while. The day on memoir writing is a different matter. As regular readers of this blog know, I've posted quite a lot of abridged excerpts of memoirs that I began to write a quarter of a century ago. I've written my life story in chronological order, but lately I've had second thoughts about such a conventional, stereotyped approach. Instead in my most recent revision I've begun with the life-changing event, the day I met my beloved Janet Wendy. I'm not yet happy about my composition. I've tried out several attempts in posts on this blog, and several others that have remained private. I'm sure I'll get it right eventually but I don't feel that I'm quite there yet. It's great fun trying though, so I'll keep trying, and probably I'll post on this blog some of my future attempts to get it right. There have been several other life-changing events or episodes in my family's life story, and it may make sense to write at some length about each of these, then fill in briefly, sketchily, the spaces in between. That's what I hope to get some guidance on next weekend. No doubt I'll return to this topic with further remarks after next weekend.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Wedding Anniversary
Today would have been our 56th wedding anniversary if Wendy still lived. I can best commemorate it by posting a few photos:
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| In the garden, 238 Melbourne Street, North Adelaide, 14 February 1957 |
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| Cutting the wedding cake |
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| In the back garden, 5 Greenbank Crescent, Edinburgh, Scotland, Summer 1969 |
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| Janet Wendy's Birthday, 14 October 2001 |
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| Golden Wedding 14 February 2007 |
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| 30th wedding anniversary, Sydney, NSW, 1987 |
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Mentors, advisers, and others
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines mentor as an experienced and trusted adviser or guide. In Homer's Odyssey, Mentor was tutor to the youthful Telemachus, son of Odysseus. Having been very effectively mentored as described in my previous post, I became mentor to occasional medical students in a series of relationships. The longest-lasting of these dates back 40 years and it has evolved into a collegial friendship. I'll consider the mentor's perspective later, but first there is more to say about my perspective as a receptor.
The relationship to a mentor is usually long-lasting and can evolve into a two-way mutually beneficial friendship with emotional bonding and social, cultural interactions. In addition to a handful of mentors, I've had wagon-loads of advisers, some ephemeral, some for long periods, occasionally years. I like to think that I am always receptive when I ask for advice, and often even when the advice is unsolicited. Whence comes this advice? Just about anywhere: colleagues, peers, those higher up the food chain than I, and those who are lower. Looking back over a long lifetime I can't recall many occasions when the advice or suggestions were inappropriate, wrong, or unwise; and only one or two that were malicious or ill-intentioned. That came from a pair of militant feminists when I was a newly appointed department head. It never occurred to me that colleagues in whom I had placed my trust would deliberately set out to betray my trust, but in retrospect I saw that it had been a useful experience because it made me aware that even in the ivory tower of academia there are people motivated by malice rather than good will towards their colleagues. Over the course of half a century in academia I've observed malicious motives at work no more than a small handful of times, and my own career has been almost entirely free of such unsavoury influences. On the other, the good side of the ledger, there must have been hundreds of times when good and wise advice has helped to steer me towards right decisions and desirable outcomes. A good example appears in the Acknowledgements in the Front Matter of the second edition of my book, Public Health and Human Ecology. The names listed there are those of people whom I was able to identify, whose advice, suggestions, or responses to specific requests, helped made that a better book than it would otherwise have been. Similar lists of names appear in the Front Matter of other books that carry my name on the title page. I assembled a list of names of people and organizations to thank when I prepared annual reports of departmental activities for the Dean of the medical school, during the years that I was head of the department, but someone deleted this paragraph when the reports were printed - I suppose in the interests of uniformity because other department heads hadn't provided comparable data. What these data show is the fact that the quest for excellence is a collegial, collaborative activity, in which team work of a very high order is a sine qua non.
The relationship to a mentor is usually long-lasting and can evolve into a two-way mutually beneficial friendship with emotional bonding and social, cultural interactions. In addition to a handful of mentors, I've had wagon-loads of advisers, some ephemeral, some for long periods, occasionally years. I like to think that I am always receptive when I ask for advice, and often even when the advice is unsolicited. Whence comes this advice? Just about anywhere: colleagues, peers, those higher up the food chain than I, and those who are lower. Looking back over a long lifetime I can't recall many occasions when the advice or suggestions were inappropriate, wrong, or unwise; and only one or two that were malicious or ill-intentioned. That came from a pair of militant feminists when I was a newly appointed department head. It never occurred to me that colleagues in whom I had placed my trust would deliberately set out to betray my trust, but in retrospect I saw that it had been a useful experience because it made me aware that even in the ivory tower of academia there are people motivated by malice rather than good will towards their colleagues. Over the course of half a century in academia I've observed malicious motives at work no more than a small handful of times, and my own career has been almost entirely free of such unsavoury influences. On the other, the good side of the ledger, there must have been hundreds of times when good and wise advice has helped to steer me towards right decisions and desirable outcomes. A good example appears in the Acknowledgements in the Front Matter of the second edition of my book, Public Health and Human Ecology. The names listed there are those of people whom I was able to identify, whose advice, suggestions, or responses to specific requests, helped made that a better book than it would otherwise have been. Similar lists of names appear in the Front Matter of other books that carry my name on the title page. I assembled a list of names of people and organizations to thank when I prepared annual reports of departmental activities for the Dean of the medical school, during the years that I was head of the department, but someone deleted this paragraph when the reports were printed - I suppose in the interests of uniformity because other department heads hadn't provided comparable data. What these data show is the fact that the quest for excellence is a collegial, collaborative activity, in which team work of a very high order is a sine qua non.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Mentors and other career-shaping influences
Judged by conventional criteria I've had a productive and successful career. Once I had decided what I wanted to do - a collective, collaborative decision shared with my beloved Wendy - I had to decide, we had to decide, where I would work and with whom, and what aspects of the work would get highest priority. Chance and good luck played a part in this early in my career, along with willingness to take chances and to seize opportunities. My motto could have been carpe diem, seize the day. Looking back over the trajectory of my lifetime career, I can identify half a dozen or more critically important diems that I carped. I've mentioned a few in earlier posts on this blog and and I'll examine these and others in the future. Today I want to focus on a few mentors who helped by steering me in the most favourable directions.
I've been especially fortunate in my choices of mentors on several occasions. At other times I've had support and encouragement from colleagues, usually my seniors, who were not mentors but nevertheless gave me good advice at times when I needed it.
This first happened during my last two years or so in the Western Clinic, the 10-partner group practice in which I was the newly recruited most junior partner. Clarrie Rieger, one of the most senior partners, a surgeon whom I'd first met when he'd been one of my teachers in medical school, was an eminent medical politician, president of the Australian Medical Association, negotiating with the federal government about conditions and fee for service payments in the tax-supported medical benefits system that had begun to take over from private insurance as the way to finance medical and hospital care in Australia. He wanted to groom me as future medical politician, a societal role for which I had no taste at all; but through him I met and interacted with senior medical politicians throughout Australia. I respected and liked almost all of these men - they were all men, not a woman among them in those days - and they liked me. Several gave me good advice as I was making the transition from private practice to salaried academic life and work. At that vitally important decision node in my professional life and in our family's life (Wendy and I had two toddler children by then, Rebecca 3, almost 4, and David 15 months younger) I had helpful suggestions also from Norrie Robson, recently appointed professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide.
In my time there, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney was not a stimulating academic centre; it was intellectually moribund. For the greater part I set my own goals, wrote my own study programs and got a great deal out of my time there. By aggressively challenging two or three senior staff members I managed to get more out of my interactions with them than anyone ever previously had managed to do. I also made intellectually valuable contacts elsewhere in Sydney, notably with David Madison, professor of psychiatry who mentored me as I set about learning psychiatry; Ron Winton, editor of the Medical Journal of Australia; Ian Maddocks who came closest to practising social medicine; and several of the movers and shakers in the nascent College of General Practitioners.
Towards the end of my time in general practice I read an article in the British Medical Journal on "Uses of Epidemiology" by Professor J N Morris, and then I read his small book with the same title. This article and his book which expanded his ideas changed my life. I wrote to Jerry Morris to explore the possibility of working with him in the Medical Research Council's Social Medicine Research Unit. I got a modest traveling fellowship from the Australian Postgraduate Medical Federation which covered the cost of my travel from Australia to London and paid a stipend intended for a single man for six months. I finagled this into almost 12 months - the most mind-expanding year of my life - and Jerry Morris became my first real mentor. I learnt more from him in that year than I'd learnt in all my previous educational experiences, not just about epidemiology but also about other public health sciences. During that year I met almost all the stars in the firmament of British Social Medicine and became friends with all of them. Jerry was the son of a rabbi in Gorbals, the Glasgow slum. He never lost his Glasgow working class accent, or the iconoclastic attitudes that went with it. He was a marvellous mentor and implanted in me for life his critical, sceptical, evidence-based approach to epidemiology and the other public health sciences that relate to it.
I had a second mentor in the Social Medicine Research Unit: John Lee, a tall, plump man with a loud laugh, whose main interests at that time were the cause or causes of an uptick in death rates from many unrelated conditions around the time of adolescence, and the biological as well as epidemiological determinants of cancer. I learnt a great deal about ways to collect and display evidence to the best advantage from John Lee.
My predecessor as a visiting fellow in the Social Medicine Research Unit had been Kerr L White, MD, a Canadian who had moved to the USA and was head of the department of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Vermont at the time our lives first intersected. He became my next important mentor. I learnt much from him when I worked under his supervision at the University of Vermont for a year in 1964-65; and after that he intervened in my life at several critically important times with attractive career opportunities, always accompanied by wise counsel. Kerr White is exactly 10 years older than I, so he would be 96 if he still lives - as I think he must because I'd have heard if he had died. I know his father lived to a great age, so Kerr is probably following a similar genetic pathway. His most important influence on my life and career came when as president of the International Epidemiological Association he selected me to compile and edit the Dictionary of Epidemiology. Many of our peers regard Kerr White as a cold, aloof man. This was never my perception, or Wendy's. He admired Wendy's unwavering support for me, and my dedication to my family and to my career, and both Kerr and his wife Isobel showed great kindness to all my family.
Many other people have played prominent roles in shaping my career, but this is enough for now. I'll have more to say about some of those others in future posts on this blog.
I've been especially fortunate in my choices of mentors on several occasions. At other times I've had support and encouragement from colleagues, usually my seniors, who were not mentors but nevertheless gave me good advice at times when I needed it.
This first happened during my last two years or so in the Western Clinic, the 10-partner group practice in which I was the newly recruited most junior partner. Clarrie Rieger, one of the most senior partners, a surgeon whom I'd first met when he'd been one of my teachers in medical school, was an eminent medical politician, president of the Australian Medical Association, negotiating with the federal government about conditions and fee for service payments in the tax-supported medical benefits system that had begun to take over from private insurance as the way to finance medical and hospital care in Australia. He wanted to groom me as future medical politician, a societal role for which I had no taste at all; but through him I met and interacted with senior medical politicians throughout Australia. I respected and liked almost all of these men - they were all men, not a woman among them in those days - and they liked me. Several gave me good advice as I was making the transition from private practice to salaried academic life and work. At that vitally important decision node in my professional life and in our family's life (Wendy and I had two toddler children by then, Rebecca 3, almost 4, and David 15 months younger) I had helpful suggestions also from Norrie Robson, recently appointed professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide.
In my time there, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney was not a stimulating academic centre; it was intellectually moribund. For the greater part I set my own goals, wrote my own study programs and got a great deal out of my time there. By aggressively challenging two or three senior staff members I managed to get more out of my interactions with them than anyone ever previously had managed to do. I also made intellectually valuable contacts elsewhere in Sydney, notably with David Madison, professor of psychiatry who mentored me as I set about learning psychiatry; Ron Winton, editor of the Medical Journal of Australia; Ian Maddocks who came closest to practising social medicine; and several of the movers and shakers in the nascent College of General Practitioners.
Towards the end of my time in general practice I read an article in the British Medical Journal on "Uses of Epidemiology" by Professor J N Morris, and then I read his small book with the same title. This article and his book which expanded his ideas changed my life. I wrote to Jerry Morris to explore the possibility of working with him in the Medical Research Council's Social Medicine Research Unit. I got a modest traveling fellowship from the Australian Postgraduate Medical Federation which covered the cost of my travel from Australia to London and paid a stipend intended for a single man for six months. I finagled this into almost 12 months - the most mind-expanding year of my life - and Jerry Morris became my first real mentor. I learnt more from him in that year than I'd learnt in all my previous educational experiences, not just about epidemiology but also about other public health sciences. During that year I met almost all the stars in the firmament of British Social Medicine and became friends with all of them. Jerry was the son of a rabbi in Gorbals, the Glasgow slum. He never lost his Glasgow working class accent, or the iconoclastic attitudes that went with it. He was a marvellous mentor and implanted in me for life his critical, sceptical, evidence-based approach to epidemiology and the other public health sciences that relate to it.
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| John Lee, Stuart Morrison, Jerry Morris, at the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit, December 1961. All three played important parts in shaping my career |
I had a second mentor in the Social Medicine Research Unit: John Lee, a tall, plump man with a loud laugh, whose main interests at that time were the cause or causes of an uptick in death rates from many unrelated conditions around the time of adolescence, and the biological as well as epidemiological determinants of cancer. I learnt a great deal about ways to collect and display evidence to the best advantage from John Lee.
My predecessor as a visiting fellow in the Social Medicine Research Unit had been Kerr L White, MD, a Canadian who had moved to the USA and was head of the department of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Vermont at the time our lives first intersected. He became my next important mentor. I learnt much from him when I worked under his supervision at the University of Vermont for a year in 1964-65; and after that he intervened in my life at several critically important times with attractive career opportunities, always accompanied by wise counsel. Kerr White is exactly 10 years older than I, so he would be 96 if he still lives - as I think he must because I'd have heard if he had died. I know his father lived to a great age, so Kerr is probably following a similar genetic pathway. His most important influence on my life and career came when as president of the International Epidemiological Association he selected me to compile and edit the Dictionary of Epidemiology. Many of our peers regard Kerr White as a cold, aloof man. This was never my perception, or Wendy's. He admired Wendy's unwavering support for me, and my dedication to my family and to my career, and both Kerr and his wife Isobel showed great kindness to all my family.
Many other people have played prominent roles in shaping my career, but this is enough for now. I'll have more to say about some of those others in future posts on this blog.
Friday, January 25, 2013
More recent reading
Here are brief notes on some books I've read recently.
Behind the beautiful forevers, by Katherine Boo is brilliant narrative journalism by a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist of Dutch origin (hence her name) about a few families and young children living on their own in the sprawling shanty-town slum I remember seeing - and smelling - on the approach road to Mumbai (Bombay) International Airport. The "beautiful forevers" are the high painted fences that prevent the slum from encroaching on the airport. The inhabitants of this slum are at the very bottom of the socio-economic heap, a bad place to be in any country, probably worse in a huge Indian city like Mumbai than almost anywhere else. Somehow they survive, much of the time anyway, though many die too, confronted by universal corruption, merciless bullying, cheating, robbery, to which they are subjected. This is an outstanding book, hard to put down to eat or sleep.
419 by Will Ferguson won the Giller Prize last year. I think it's over-rated rubbish, strains credibility beyond breaking point. Real people would have to be extraordinarily naive and very stupid to behave as do some of the characters in this implausible story of Nigerian con artists who loot the savings of gullible Canadians.
Still life and A Trick of the Light are two elegant who-dunnits by Louise Penny, set in the fictional village of Three Pines, home to artists and writers in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. They are part of a series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec. Two may be enough for me but if I feel in the mood for more, there are several, all reputedly as good as these two.
Essays of E B White. I read some of these when they appeared in the New Yorker in the late 1940s. It was a nostalgic pleasure to reread them.; and they took me back to archy and mehitabel as I've already related in an earlier post
Things I didn't know, by Robert Hughes, the Australian art historian and public intellectual. is a memoir that, like Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton, opens with an account of a life-changing crisis - a near fatal road traffic crash - then traces the course through life from childhood onward, of Robert Hughes. Like The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes's account of convict colonization of New South Wales, it's beautifully written, an ideal memoir. I am following this model in the latest revision of my own memoirs and intend to test drive some opening paragraphs of this revision in a forthcoming post on this blog.
Alexander McCall Smith's series about Isobel Dalhousie, independently wealthy editor of the fictitious Journal of Applied Ethics is highly addictive- for me anyway, and I imagine for many other lovers of Edinburgh who have the misfortune to be exiled from that loveliest of cities. The latest in this series is The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, but when I sing the praises of this series in particular, I suggest to anyone unfamiliar with Edinburgh and with Isobel Dalhousie, start at the beginning with the first book in the series, The Sunday Philosophy Club. Was there ever a more prolific author? I doubt it. And his books, though light, always contain skillfully wrapped moral and ethical conundrums that add heft to their seeming light weight. They are well written too.
Did I mention Carmen Aguirre's memoir, Something Fierce in an earlier post? This won the Canada Reads contest on CBC Radio, deservedly so. It's a rattling good yarn about a girl, exiled with her family from Pinochet's Chile, daughter of opponents of the regime, who spent her early childhood in Canada and became a revolutionary in adolescence. It's a coming of age memoir with hair-raising accounts of gun-running and other adventures, illicit journeys into Chile, a catch-as-catch-can education acquired in Bolivia, Argentina as well as Canada; learning to fly so she could pilot plane-loads of guns into Chile. I suppose most of it is true.
What else? I've reread a biography of Tommy Douglas, founder of Canadian Medicare and voted the Greatest Canadian in a CBC-sponsored poll. I struggled through Eugenia, by Mark Tedeschi, an Australian book that brother Peter sent me, about a transsexual woman who lived as a man for many years and 'married' two women, one of whom he/she was accused and convicted of murdering. It's interesting mainly as a reflection on the quality of Australian justice and forensic investigation in the 1920s, the time of the events described. It's very well written. I don't know what it's like now but in my youth, Australian justice often resembled the frontier justice depicted in Hollywood movies, and clearly Eugenia Falleni was a victim of primitive justice - as would have been the case had the trial taken place in Canada, USA or the UK in the 1920s or before. I like to think we've advanced in the last 90-100 years. I liked the sympathetic discussion of gender identity in this book, and I'll share it with someone I know who has been struggling though problems associated with this state of affairs.
I almost forgot the iPad and e-books! Many classics are available free from the Gutenberg Collection; I've just finished Voltaire's Candide, and before that I read Pride and Prejudice (of course!); several of James Joyce's short stories, some of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; Fanny Hill; and a big chunk of Tristam Shandy; others too, but I forget exactly what. I must have read a dozen or more other books since I last posted a 'book report' on this blog, but that's all I can recall for now. Reading is my greatest pleasure and I do a prodigious amount of it, should use e-books more, but I love the sensuous pleasure of holding a book in my hands and turning the pages.
Behind the beautiful forevers, by Katherine Boo is brilliant narrative journalism by a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist of Dutch origin (hence her name) about a few families and young children living on their own in the sprawling shanty-town slum I remember seeing - and smelling - on the approach road to Mumbai (Bombay) International Airport. The "beautiful forevers" are the high painted fences that prevent the slum from encroaching on the airport. The inhabitants of this slum are at the very bottom of the socio-economic heap, a bad place to be in any country, probably worse in a huge Indian city like Mumbai than almost anywhere else. Somehow they survive, much of the time anyway, though many die too, confronted by universal corruption, merciless bullying, cheating, robbery, to which they are subjected. This is an outstanding book, hard to put down to eat or sleep.
419 by Will Ferguson won the Giller Prize last year. I think it's over-rated rubbish, strains credibility beyond breaking point. Real people would have to be extraordinarily naive and very stupid to behave as do some of the characters in this implausible story of Nigerian con artists who loot the savings of gullible Canadians.
Still life and A Trick of the Light are two elegant who-dunnits by Louise Penny, set in the fictional village of Three Pines, home to artists and writers in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. They are part of a series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec. Two may be enough for me but if I feel in the mood for more, there are several, all reputedly as good as these two.
Essays of E B White. I read some of these when they appeared in the New Yorker in the late 1940s. It was a nostalgic pleasure to reread them.; and they took me back to archy and mehitabel as I've already related in an earlier post
Things I didn't know, by Robert Hughes, the Australian art historian and public intellectual. is a memoir that, like Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton, opens with an account of a life-changing crisis - a near fatal road traffic crash - then traces the course through life from childhood onward, of Robert Hughes. Like The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes's account of convict colonization of New South Wales, it's beautifully written, an ideal memoir. I am following this model in the latest revision of my own memoirs and intend to test drive some opening paragraphs of this revision in a forthcoming post on this blog.
Alexander McCall Smith's series about Isobel Dalhousie, independently wealthy editor of the fictitious Journal of Applied Ethics is highly addictive- for me anyway, and I imagine for many other lovers of Edinburgh who have the misfortune to be exiled from that loveliest of cities. The latest in this series is The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, but when I sing the praises of this series in particular, I suggest to anyone unfamiliar with Edinburgh and with Isobel Dalhousie, start at the beginning with the first book in the series, The Sunday Philosophy Club. Was there ever a more prolific author? I doubt it. And his books, though light, always contain skillfully wrapped moral and ethical conundrums that add heft to their seeming light weight. They are well written too.
Did I mention Carmen Aguirre's memoir, Something Fierce in an earlier post? This won the Canada Reads contest on CBC Radio, deservedly so. It's a rattling good yarn about a girl, exiled with her family from Pinochet's Chile, daughter of opponents of the regime, who spent her early childhood in Canada and became a revolutionary in adolescence. It's a coming of age memoir with hair-raising accounts of gun-running and other adventures, illicit journeys into Chile, a catch-as-catch-can education acquired in Bolivia, Argentina as well as Canada; learning to fly so she could pilot plane-loads of guns into Chile. I suppose most of it is true.
What else? I've reread a biography of Tommy Douglas, founder of Canadian Medicare and voted the Greatest Canadian in a CBC-sponsored poll. I struggled through Eugenia, by Mark Tedeschi, an Australian book that brother Peter sent me, about a transsexual woman who lived as a man for many years and 'married' two women, one of whom he/she was accused and convicted of murdering. It's interesting mainly as a reflection on the quality of Australian justice and forensic investigation in the 1920s, the time of the events described. It's very well written. I don't know what it's like now but in my youth, Australian justice often resembled the frontier justice depicted in Hollywood movies, and clearly Eugenia Falleni was a victim of primitive justice - as would have been the case had the trial taken place in Canada, USA or the UK in the 1920s or before. I like to think we've advanced in the last 90-100 years. I liked the sympathetic discussion of gender identity in this book, and I'll share it with someone I know who has been struggling though problems associated with this state of affairs.
I almost forgot the iPad and e-books! Many classics are available free from the Gutenberg Collection; I've just finished Voltaire's Candide, and before that I read Pride and Prejudice (of course!); several of James Joyce's short stories, some of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; Fanny Hill; and a big chunk of Tristam Shandy; others too, but I forget exactly what. I must have read a dozen or more other books since I last posted a 'book report' on this blog, but that's all I can recall for now. Reading is my greatest pleasure and I do a prodigious amount of it, should use e-books more, but I love the sensuous pleasure of holding a book in my hands and turning the pages.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Looking back, looking forward
Occasionally I look at the statistics that Google compiles automatically about this blog, and when I do, I'm always perplexed. I started blogging as a convenient way to inform family and friends scattered around the world about Wendy's condition as motor neurone disease or ALS relentlessly advanced and ultimately took her life. I hope I've emphasized clearly enough that the disease wasn't the terrible, much feared end of life that many try to avoid by physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. It was a painless and gentle ending. The most distressing or frustrating aspect was loss of speech when the muscles Wendy used to speak were knocked out a few weeks before she died. It was surely preferable to a lingering death from disseminated cancer or Alzheimer's disease.
Since her death I've used the blog as a form of therapy for me, posting abridged and edited excerpts of my memoirs, and haphazard comments on many other themes and topics, notably about books I've been reading. I do a great deal of reading and it's fun to share with others my opinions about books I've been reading lately. I'm happy to share with others but I write entirely for my own amusement.
Who are these others? I'm fascinated when I review the statistics, especially the table headed 'Audience' which tabulates the countries from which readers come. The blog is getting about 1000 hits/month now. Readers come from many countries, more from Canada than anywhere else most of the time though there are occasional times when what I've written attracts more readers in the USA or the UK than in Canada. A few people arrive at particular posts when a Google search directs them to it; I assume that's why posts on Sri Lanka, Glenelg, Sympathy and Condolence messages, touring Europe, and Early Childhood attract so many. I assume that a steady small number of readers in Brazil, Turkey, Japan, Iran, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, as well as some of those in Canada, USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand are family members, friends, professional colleagues. But I'm perplexed by the steady small following I seem to have in Latvia, Ukraine, Slovenia, where so far as I know I have no family, friends or colleagues. It would be nice if a few of them dropped me a line to let me know who they are and why they bother to read my blog.
What's in store for my faithful followers? I've mentioned a post on recent reading some time soon. There are a few current issues I intend to discuss, including family violence, the perennial problem of guns over which my friends in the USA obsess often; and, most important, a review by Paul and Anne Ehrlich of threats to human communities that was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society in its first issue for 2013. Also, I've been revising and reworking my memoirs, adopting suggestions that have come out of writers' workshops. Instead of a straightforward chronological record from birth onward, I've begun the revision with a chapter on a defining event that set the course of the rest of my life -- picking up a pair of hitch hikers one sunny Sunday morning when I was on my way to play golf. I'm also writing into the memoirs a more detailed description of some of the distinguished people I've had the pleasure and privilege of meeting, interacting and working with in the course of my long and interesting professional life.
Since her death I've used the blog as a form of therapy for me, posting abridged and edited excerpts of my memoirs, and haphazard comments on many other themes and topics, notably about books I've been reading. I do a great deal of reading and it's fun to share with others my opinions about books I've been reading lately. I'm happy to share with others but I write entirely for my own amusement.
Who are these others? I'm fascinated when I review the statistics, especially the table headed 'Audience' which tabulates the countries from which readers come. The blog is getting about 1000 hits/month now. Readers come from many countries, more from Canada than anywhere else most of the time though there are occasional times when what I've written attracts more readers in the USA or the UK than in Canada. A few people arrive at particular posts when a Google search directs them to it; I assume that's why posts on Sri Lanka, Glenelg, Sympathy and Condolence messages, touring Europe, and Early Childhood attract so many. I assume that a steady small number of readers in Brazil, Turkey, Japan, Iran, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, as well as some of those in Canada, USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand are family members, friends, professional colleagues. But I'm perplexed by the steady small following I seem to have in Latvia, Ukraine, Slovenia, where so far as I know I have no family, friends or colleagues. It would be nice if a few of them dropped me a line to let me know who they are and why they bother to read my blog.
What's in store for my faithful followers? I've mentioned a post on recent reading some time soon. There are a few current issues I intend to discuss, including family violence, the perennial problem of guns over which my friends in the USA obsess often; and, most important, a review by Paul and Anne Ehrlich of threats to human communities that was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society in its first issue for 2013. Also, I've been revising and reworking my memoirs, adopting suggestions that have come out of writers' workshops. Instead of a straightforward chronological record from birth onward, I've begun the revision with a chapter on a defining event that set the course of the rest of my life -- picking up a pair of hitch hikers one sunny Sunday morning when I was on my way to play golf. I'm also writing into the memoirs a more detailed description of some of the distinguished people I've had the pleasure and privilege of meeting, interacting and working with in the course of my long and interesting professional life.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
archy and mehitabel
My friend Karen Trollope Kumar gave me a copy of selected essays by E B White, and I've been rereading them with great pleasure. Some appeared in the New Yorker in the late 1940s when I subscribed to this magazine in the latter part of its greatest years as the repository for the best writing and best cartoons in America, perhaps in the world at that time. I've been reading them slowly, sipping them as I'd sip a single malt whisky. A few days ago I came to E B White's eulogy for Don Marquis, who was a reporter for the New York Sun, a playwright, and the creator of archy and mehitabel. archy was a cockroach who contained the transmigrated soul of a verse libre poet. archy typed his bad poetry, which contained much simple homespun philosophy, in the newspaper's office after everyone had left for the day. He typed painstakingly and painfully (for him) on a huge Office Underwood typewriter by diving head-first on to the keyboard, one letter at a time. He wasn't able to operate the shift key, so everything is typed lower case; how he operated the carriage to shift the paper down one line at a time is never explained. mehitabel is a disreputable alley cat of questionable lineage and parentage, with the transmigrated soul of Cleopatra and sundry other notorious girls with equivocal moral and ethical standards. Naturally, after reading E B White's eulogy of Don Marquis I had to go back to the complete archy and mehitabel poems, which amazingly still survive on the set of book shelves where I keep my most precious books. I quoted one of the shorter poems in my last post, and the temptation to post more is irresistible.
Here is archy's first 'poem' in the sequence that ran for years:
expression is the need of my soul
i was once a verse libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the underside now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont
she catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for
there is a rat here she should get without delay
most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it
i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then
don't you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i havent had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy
I'm tempted to add the next poem, about and partly by mehitabel, but it will keep for another time.
Here is archy's first 'poem' in the sequence that ran for years:
expression is the need of my soul
i was once a verse libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the underside now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont
she catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for
there is a rat here she should get without delay
most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it
i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then
don't you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i havent had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy
I'm tempted to add the next poem, about and partly by mehitabel, but it will keep for another time.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Clashes and crystal ball-gazing
For years there has been loose talk about a "clash of civilizations" but I think the reality is at one level simpler, at another more complex. The chronic conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan is ultimately a territorial dispute between pastoralists and nomads for shrinking fresh water resources; the chronic conflict in the Eastern Congo is a struggle among warlords for control of rich but scarce natural resources. I believe all the intractable festering low level armed conflicts that collectively have killed tens of millions and maimed score of millions in the last 50 years aren't so much based in religious or ethnic differences as in a struggle for survival in a world where too many people seek their share of declining essentials to sustain their lives. I'm sure this is true of the latest outbreak in Mali that's worrying the French and the Americans, and no doubt our leaders in Canada. What's really happening is that the human swarm is running out of essentials for survival in zones of scarcity all over the world. The struggles are most overt in Africa but seem likely to flare up in the Middle East and south central Asia any day. In a facile way these struggles can be related to religious or ethnic differences or to the level of development in different regions. Put more harshly, humans who were always more predatory and parasitic than other species in the biosphere have become rather like a cancer on the surface of the earth. We are destroying life supporting ecosystems, and in the near future more of us everywhere may be forced to fight for a sufficient share in order to survive. I first ventured into print with thoughts along these lines in 1949 when I was a 23-year-old medical student a few months away from graduating. I wrote gloomily about population pressure, war, famine, reduced genetic diversity, deteriorating moral and ethical standards - I was a cheerful young chap, wasn't I? With more optimism than realism I suggested that a society led by members of the medical profession would be best equipped to deal with or prevent these dire outcomes.
My gloomy predictions haven't come true yet. But I think Don Marquis's creation, archy the cockroach got it right:
prophecies
the papers are full of the prophecies
of preachers professors and laymen
to the effect that this human civilization
is on the way out
and it looks to an insect such as i
very possible
the only thing i wonder about
is why the human species call it a civilization
human society has never been
as well organized as a hill of ants
or a hive of bees
and all the ancient sites of civilization
are now in the possession of insects
who are far superior in organization
and in their ethical practices
spiders bite the mummified feet
of the pharaohs of egypt
and the kings of babylon are covered with fleas
which they are too defunct to feel
archy the cockroach
I'll say more about archy the cockroach and his best friend mehitabel the cat who is the reincarnated shade of Cleopatra in my next post.
My gloomy predictions haven't come true yet. But I think Don Marquis's creation, archy the cockroach got it right:
prophecies
the papers are full of the prophecies
of preachers professors and laymen
to the effect that this human civilization
is on the way out
and it looks to an insect such as i
very possible
the only thing i wonder about
is why the human species call it a civilization
human society has never been
as well organized as a hill of ants
or a hive of bees
and all the ancient sites of civilization
are now in the possession of insects
who are far superior in organization
and in their ethical practices
spiders bite the mummified feet
of the pharaohs of egypt
and the kings of babylon are covered with fleas
which they are too defunct to feel
archy the cockroach
I'll say more about archy the cockroach and his best friend mehitabel the cat who is the reincarnated shade of Cleopatra in my next post.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Mistakes
Occasionally a flesh-creeping memory bubbles to the surface, or one that makes me cringe with shame or embarrassment. Sometimes I recall medical mistakes, errors of judgement, sins of omission and sins of commission. Most are little things and mostly I believe I learnt from my mistakes, didn't make the same mistake a second time. I told the sad story of what I regard as my worst sin of omission, my failure to recognize, receive and react to distress signals transmitted on an unconventional wavelength, in a post on this blog about a patient I called Peter Szas whose suicide I have always thought would not have happened if I had been more perceptive. had more empathy, more experience (See "Missed signals," February 12 2012). All young doctors make mistakes due to inexperience. One day a patient who happened to be a personal friend hit his thumb rather than the tack he was vigorously hammering. I drained the painful blood clot under his thumbnail. But I didn't Xray his thumb, didn't discover the crush fracture of the bone below his thumbnail. The hole I bored into his thumbnail to relieve the pressure from the blood clot converted that closed fracture into a compound fracture, the crushed bone got infected, eventually had to be amputated and he lost the extremely important and useful terminal bone, joint, nail, pad of skin and its nerve endings, all the features that make the terminal joint of human thumbs so valuable to us. If such a calamity happened in these litigious times rather than in 1955, he might have sued me for malpractice, and would probably win. I never made that mistake again, and the lesson I learnt from it became an example in one of my regular tutorials with medical students.
Once I slapped an obnoxious little girl, in front of her mother too, to try to make her behave so I could listen to her heart and lungs and look at her throat. Oh, I'd tried everything else first and I had her mother's agreement - her mother told me to do it in fact - and it worked, the little brat shut up; but it would be a criminal offence if I were to do this now. What's more important, I'm sure it would have been unnecessary if I'd been more experienced, had more arrows in my quiver, at that time. Kneeling at her level and whispering to her, for instance, might have worked.
In a later phase life as chairman of the curriculum committee, I presented to faculty council a proposal for some common-sense fine tuning of teaching time allocated to various subjects. I had neglected to consult in advance with a few department chairmen whose teaching hours would expand or contract by an hour or so each year as a result of this eminently sensible change in the curriculum. It was the most angry, acrimonious meeting ever. I had overlooked a vitally important fact: department chairmen, especially those who feel a trifle insecure, have an attitude towards allocated teaching time (measured in minutes, not hours!) resembling that of mediaeval barons and dukes to their fiefdoms. I learnt never to present proposals to colleagues in a manner that may come as a nasty surprise.
I am a lousy public speaker. I think I've improved gradually over the years but reflecting even on some relatively recent performances, I shudder with shame at the recollection of times when I rambled off topic, digressing from my written text into a boring in-group anecdote, or made a feeble joke based on a play on words. I've always been fond of making a play on words, often a kind of pun. I did it at school once, with very painful results: my play in words made use of the names of half a dozen prefects. I was summoned to their sanctum, commanded to apologize, but was so terrified and intimidated I had no idea what I had done wrong, and when I asked, the head prefect was so enraged he gave me an extra "six of the best" on top of the prescribed four for my crime of disrespect for authority. I don't think I learnt anything useful from the experience but I carried the bruises from the beating on my backside for several weeks.
Ah well. No doubt all of us could do better if we had a second go around the track.
Once I slapped an obnoxious little girl, in front of her mother too, to try to make her behave so I could listen to her heart and lungs and look at her throat. Oh, I'd tried everything else first and I had her mother's agreement - her mother told me to do it in fact - and it worked, the little brat shut up; but it would be a criminal offence if I were to do this now. What's more important, I'm sure it would have been unnecessary if I'd been more experienced, had more arrows in my quiver, at that time. Kneeling at her level and whispering to her, for instance, might have worked.
In a later phase life as chairman of the curriculum committee, I presented to faculty council a proposal for some common-sense fine tuning of teaching time allocated to various subjects. I had neglected to consult in advance with a few department chairmen whose teaching hours would expand or contract by an hour or so each year as a result of this eminently sensible change in the curriculum. It was the most angry, acrimonious meeting ever. I had overlooked a vitally important fact: department chairmen, especially those who feel a trifle insecure, have an attitude towards allocated teaching time (measured in minutes, not hours!) resembling that of mediaeval barons and dukes to their fiefdoms. I learnt never to present proposals to colleagues in a manner that may come as a nasty surprise.
I am a lousy public speaker. I think I've improved gradually over the years but reflecting even on some relatively recent performances, I shudder with shame at the recollection of times when I rambled off topic, digressing from my written text into a boring in-group anecdote, or made a feeble joke based on a play on words. I've always been fond of making a play on words, often a kind of pun. I did it at school once, with very painful results: my play in words made use of the names of half a dozen prefects. I was summoned to their sanctum, commanded to apologize, but was so terrified and intimidated I had no idea what I had done wrong, and when I asked, the head prefect was so enraged he gave me an extra "six of the best" on top of the prescribed four for my crime of disrespect for authority. I don't think I learnt anything useful from the experience but I carried the bruises from the beating on my backside for several weeks.
Ah well. No doubt all of us could do better if we had a second go around the track.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
What attracted me to Wendy
Jan Wendelken ("Wendy") and John Last earnestly talking on a hillside above Yankalilla beach, South Australia, September 1955
Photo by Louise Zuhrer
There hasn't been a day since she died that I haven't thought about Wendy. I went public with the story of our meeting when Shelagh Rogers, at the time the host of a CBC Radio classical music request program, asked her listeners who had married on St Valentine's Day to describe how they had met. I dashed off a brief account of how I'd picked up two hitch hikers when on my way to play golf one Sunday morning in the spring of 1955, and instead of dropping them 10 minutes later, spent the day driving them around. After that magical day one of the hitch hikers and I wrote increasingly passionate letters to each other until the winter of 1956, when she came back from New Zealand to Adelaide and we courted more conventionally until our marriage on St Valentine's Day 1957. I posted the story I told Shelagh Rogers on my blog on May 2, 2012. Shelagh phoned me to check a few details, and read my account on our 40th wedding anniversary, on 14 February 1997. She awarded me the prize (a CD of chamber music by Mozart) for the best story she had received.
It was a miracle that we met. I'd delivered a baby in the small hours of that morning, went back to the hospital at the far edge of our practice to make sure mother and baby were OK, so I was approaching my golf club on a road I'd never used previously to get there, and running an hour late. The two girls were running over an hour later than their intended start that day too, because the landlady of the B&B where they'd stayed the previous night was ill, and Wendy had insisted on tidying the place, washing their sheets and towels, getting fresh milk and bread before they set off. Wendy went up a long way in my estimation when Louise told me that. As we got better acquainted I got used to Wendy's spontaneous acts of altruism and generosity that were integral parts of her personality. She never boasted about these acts but in her memoir fragment "The Smile" which was published 2 months ago in Capital Writers, an anthology of stories by Ottawa writers, she casually mentions how she wrapped a TB patient's meals in towels and ran all the way to his hut at the sanatorium, to ensure that his meals reached him hot rather than cold. I wonder how many other student nurses would have done this?
Everyone who knew Wendy knew how her smile lit up her surroundings. I was instantly captivated by her smile when it lit up my little car as she got on board; and when she described some of her hitch hiking experiences as we drove on from the place where I'd picked up the two girls, her adventurous spirit and sense of fun attracted me further. Later that day as we sat on a hillside eating our lunch she was near tears as she spoke of the injustices and inequities she had observed in her nursing career. She was talking of this when Louise took the photo at the head of this post. She clearly had the same attitudes and beliefs as I, about what was wrong and what was right in the world. It was then if not sooner that I decided she was the maid for me. When I began reading her diaries after she died, I was hoping to find remarks pointing to her similar instant attraction to me, but although she writes warmly about me, she doesn't say anything that suggests such powerful emotions as I felt. But she does in later diary entries during our courtship after she came back to Adelaide. I'll have to decide whether I should allow anyone else to read her rather steamy 1956 diary...
John and Wendy about 1997
Photo by Karen Trollope Kumar
Monday, December 31, 2012
Another year-end review, this time books I've admired
Around this time of the year many people rush into print or go on line or in front of the TV camera with their pronouncements about the 10 best books, best movies, best hamburgers or whatever, of the past year. I seem to have acquired a reputation as a reader and get asked for my ideas about books worth reading, so I'll have a go at compiling my own very short list. I could use posts on this blog to jog my memory but I don't need to because the outstanding books are unforgettable. In approximate order - only approximate because they are in different categories - here are my top five books:
The better angels of our nature, Historical social and behavioural science, by Steven Pinker
Bring up the bodies, historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn by Hillary Mantel
Joseph Anton, a memoir of life under a Fatwa by Salman Rushdie
Mr g, a metaphysical novel about creation by Alan Lightman
A man of parts, a fictional biography of HG Wells, by David Lodge
I'll add an outstanding novel that I've reread this year for the second time, Cutting for Stone, about the intertwined lives of people with roots in India but living in Addis Ababa, by Abraham Verghese. I've discussed almost all of these books in posts on my blog I could add a dozen or two dozen more, some light, some heavyweight. Alexander McCall Smith's latest episode in the life of Isobel Dalhousie, editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics and her family and friends in Edinburgh flagellates all my nostalgia for that lovely city; Neil Turok's Massey Lectures on cosmology and much else stretched my mind comfortably until he left me struggling out of my depth in the last few pages of the final lecture. Ian McEwan's latest novel, Sweet Tooth is up to his usual excellent standard, confirms his place as one of the best, perhaps the very best, of contemporary British novelists. Annabel Lyon's follow-up after her prize-winning novel about Aristotle's life during the period when he was tutor to Alexander the Great is another very good novel about Aristotle's daughter Pythias, giving the author a chance to ventilate about the status of girls and women in Hellenist Greece 3 centuries before our era - not much different from the status of girls and women in modern Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. JK Rowling's very adult novel, A Casual Vacancy, is an excellent social - and political - study of almost uniformly unpleasant people in a small English town, a dark but believable story that focuses mainly on the youths of the town, randy, sexually active, amoral, unprincipled. Only one character seems to possess a spark of human decency, and she comes to a bad end. I wish JK had created at least one character like the youngsters who give me hope for the future.
There is much more to say about several of my top 5 + 1. Steven Pinker provides good evidence to support his claim that violence among humans has declined in the past 500 years. He attributes this to increasing empathy of humans for one another. I've reflected a great deal on changes in human values during my lifetime; some of my reflections and speculation about reasons for changes in values have been subjects for posts on this blog. My conclusions, although tentative, accord with Pinker's. I could put it even more simply. As knowledge grows, so does empathy. Pinker's book is a very important contribution to our understanding of the human condition, and offers some guidelines on ways we could enhance the human condition further. Unfortunately it's unlikely that any action towards this end will materialize. National leaders have other priorities than reducing violence and enhancing empathy, and the slightest hint that achieving such aims might require investment by what these leaders describe as "taxpayers" probably dooms the suggestion before it is even made. As I wait impatiently for Hillary Mantel's third novel in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and his times flashes of memories from Wolf Hall, the first volume, and Bring up the Bodies, the second volume, bubble to the surface. These are two superb novels, both worthy recipients of their Booker Prizes. They are much more than historical novels. They are political, psychological studies as well as meticulously researched histories of Tudor times in England. I'm sorry I gave away my copy of Wolf Hall, because I'd like to reread it, even though with my short remaining lifetime I probably shouldn't allow myself the luxury, as I've just done for instance with Cutting for Stone, and will doubtless do again before long with other much-loved books.
I got much more from my second reading of Cutting for Stone no doubt because it was more leisurely, more reflective than first time. I noticed among other things the son's relationship to his father, much like my relationship to my father, and the subtle yet profound differences between Ethiopians and Eritreans. And the profound differences between the front-line New York hospital where Marion Stone works, and the luxurious Boston hospital where his father works. I am more convinced than ever that this novel will become a classic.
The better angels of our nature, Historical social and behavioural science, by Steven Pinker
Bring up the bodies, historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn by Hillary Mantel
Joseph Anton, a memoir of life under a Fatwa by Salman Rushdie
Mr g, a metaphysical novel about creation by Alan Lightman
A man of parts, a fictional biography of HG Wells, by David Lodge
I'll add an outstanding novel that I've reread this year for the second time, Cutting for Stone, about the intertwined lives of people with roots in India but living in Addis Ababa, by Abraham Verghese. I've discussed almost all of these books in posts on my blog I could add a dozen or two dozen more, some light, some heavyweight. Alexander McCall Smith's latest episode in the life of Isobel Dalhousie, editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics and her family and friends in Edinburgh flagellates all my nostalgia for that lovely city; Neil Turok's Massey Lectures on cosmology and much else stretched my mind comfortably until he left me struggling out of my depth in the last few pages of the final lecture. Ian McEwan's latest novel, Sweet Tooth is up to his usual excellent standard, confirms his place as one of the best, perhaps the very best, of contemporary British novelists. Annabel Lyon's follow-up after her prize-winning novel about Aristotle's life during the period when he was tutor to Alexander the Great is another very good novel about Aristotle's daughter Pythias, giving the author a chance to ventilate about the status of girls and women in Hellenist Greece 3 centuries before our era - not much different from the status of girls and women in modern Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. JK Rowling's very adult novel, A Casual Vacancy, is an excellent social - and political - study of almost uniformly unpleasant people in a small English town, a dark but believable story that focuses mainly on the youths of the town, randy, sexually active, amoral, unprincipled. Only one character seems to possess a spark of human decency, and she comes to a bad end. I wish JK had created at least one character like the youngsters who give me hope for the future.
There is much more to say about several of my top 5 + 1. Steven Pinker provides good evidence to support his claim that violence among humans has declined in the past 500 years. He attributes this to increasing empathy of humans for one another. I've reflected a great deal on changes in human values during my lifetime; some of my reflections and speculation about reasons for changes in values have been subjects for posts on this blog. My conclusions, although tentative, accord with Pinker's. I could put it even more simply. As knowledge grows, so does empathy. Pinker's book is a very important contribution to our understanding of the human condition, and offers some guidelines on ways we could enhance the human condition further. Unfortunately it's unlikely that any action towards this end will materialize. National leaders have other priorities than reducing violence and enhancing empathy, and the slightest hint that achieving such aims might require investment by what these leaders describe as "taxpayers" probably dooms the suggestion before it is even made. As I wait impatiently for Hillary Mantel's third novel in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and his times flashes of memories from Wolf Hall, the first volume, and Bring up the Bodies, the second volume, bubble to the surface. These are two superb novels, both worthy recipients of their Booker Prizes. They are much more than historical novels. They are political, psychological studies as well as meticulously researched histories of Tudor times in England. I'm sorry I gave away my copy of Wolf Hall, because I'd like to reread it, even though with my short remaining lifetime I probably shouldn't allow myself the luxury, as I've just done for instance with Cutting for Stone, and will doubtless do again before long with other much-loved books.
I got much more from my second reading of Cutting for Stone no doubt because it was more leisurely, more reflective than first time. I noticed among other things the son's relationship to his father, much like my relationship to my father, and the subtle yet profound differences between Ethiopians and Eritreans. And the profound differences between the front-line New York hospital where Marion Stone works, and the luxurious Boston hospital where his father works. I am more convinced than ever that this novel will become a classic.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
2012
Christmas morning is as good a time as any to reflect on the year that is about to end. 2012 has been a sad and discouraging year
for many people all over the world, but I am encouraged by the youngsters
whose company I enjoy often enough to keep me going, like the medical students whom I encounter
occasionally in seminars. These students, and my grandchildren, reinfect me periodically with enough youthful enthusiasm to sustain me. I am 86
years old now, well past the average life expectancy of my birth cohort, and I
am contented as I approach the end of a long and thoroughly enjoyable, worthwhile and
interesting life. My beloved Wendy has been dead just over two years, and today
I would be happy to follow her, except that I remain curious about what my
grandchildren will do with their lives. All three are interesting young adults and full of promise. I have an incentive to live another 10 years to see
which direction their lives take, despite reminders
from my aging body that various organs and tissues are wearing out.
I'm curious about and interested in much else. Theoretical physics and the Higgs boson, for instance. I got seriously interested in theoretical physics in my last year at school and first year at university and I've stayed in touch by occasional immersion in the works of Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, and others who can clarify this arcane discipline for amateurs. I understand why the large hadron collider at CERN has enough reason to justify the enormous expense of its construction because it has proved the existence of the Higgs boson, and I can understand that the Higgs boson is the essential keystone holding together all the other particles that comprise every atom in the universe. I can understand the concept of the quantum computer and why it is orders of magnitude more powerful and versatile than the digital computer on which I'm tapping out this note to post on my blog. The theoretical physicists at the Perimeter Institute of Waterloo University say quantum computers are only a few years away from being a practical reality. Perhaps that's the ultimate in Good News to have emerged from 2012, which I have to agree with many pundits, has been a bad year on the whole.
As I tap out this note I'm listening for the second time this Christmas to a performance of Handel's Messiah. I resonate to the aria "Why do the nations so furiously rage together," and I wonder whether humans will ever learn how to settle disputes by amicable discussion rather than by killing and maiming each other. Today the death toll in Syria has reached 45,000 according to latest UN estimates, and there is no sign of resolution to this ultimately futile conflict.
Christmas Day is turning out as it should, bright sun shining down on crisp dazzling white snow, no wind, a day when it's good to be alive.
I'm curious about and interested in much else. Theoretical physics and the Higgs boson, for instance. I got seriously interested in theoretical physics in my last year at school and first year at university and I've stayed in touch by occasional immersion in the works of Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, and others who can clarify this arcane discipline for amateurs. I understand why the large hadron collider at CERN has enough reason to justify the enormous expense of its construction because it has proved the existence of the Higgs boson, and I can understand that the Higgs boson is the essential keystone holding together all the other particles that comprise every atom in the universe. I can understand the concept of the quantum computer and why it is orders of magnitude more powerful and versatile than the digital computer on which I'm tapping out this note to post on my blog. The theoretical physicists at the Perimeter Institute of Waterloo University say quantum computers are only a few years away from being a practical reality. Perhaps that's the ultimate in Good News to have emerged from 2012, which I have to agree with many pundits, has been a bad year on the whole.
As I tap out this note I'm listening for the second time this Christmas to a performance of Handel's Messiah. I resonate to the aria "Why do the nations so furiously rage together," and I wonder whether humans will ever learn how to settle disputes by amicable discussion rather than by killing and maiming each other. Today the death toll in Syria has reached 45,000 according to latest UN estimates, and there is no sign of resolution to this ultimately futile conflict.
Christmas Day is turning out as it should, bright sun shining down on crisp dazzling white snow, no wind, a day when it's good to be alive.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
How do values change?
The latest school massacre in the USA - 20 little children and 6 of their teachers shot in cold blood by a deranged 20-year old kid in a quiet town in Connecticut - has justifiably sparked more agonized discussion than any of the previous school massacres in recent years. It's been horrific enough to convert some gun-loving law makers to a more rational view of the need to restrain access to lethal weapons, and to show in stark reality the insanity of a gun lobby spokesman who asserted that if all the kindergarten teachers were armed, they would be able to defend themselves, or better yet, 'take out' deranged attackers before they had a chance to perpetrate a massacre. The absurdity of this argument is so obvious nobody but a psychopath would be taken in by it - and nobody but a psychopath would offer such an argument in the first place.
Unfortunately the 'right to bear arms' is so deeply engrained in American values that the nation as a whole isn't likely to change its ways. The moment of truth that Wendy and I experienced in Burlington, Vermont in 1964 when we discovered that we alone among all those present at a large dinner party of seemingly civilized staff people at the University of Vermont didn't keep a loaded handgun in our home, played a part in our decision to reject the USA as a suitable place to raise our children, to choose Edinburgh rather than Baltimore for the next phase of our family's development; that decision was entirely based on values. We simply didn't see the 'right to bear arms' as relevant to our way of life. Most Americans seem to regard it as profoundly important: an integral aspect of survival strategy, or akin to religious beliefs, or both. There were other reasons why we turned our backs on the USA in the mid 1960s, but the gun culture, the resort to guns as the best way to solve problems, the last resort in all other civilized nations but the first for many Americans, was a powerfully persuasive reason for Wendy and me to leave behind the higher salary, material comforts, and career opportunities, to embrace instead the rugged, more spartan and financially constrained conditions of academic and social life in Edinburgh.
If indeed the American people are more hospitable this week than they previously were to the notion of some restraint on untrammelled access to assault rifles, rifles fitted with grenade launchers forsooth, then this will be a vivid illustration of how suddenly societal values can change. It's usually a slower process, but there have been past examples of sudden value changes when a single event shocks an entire population into awareness that past values and behaviours must change. The Earl of Shaftesbury and other social reformers in 19th century England achieved success in the campaign to abolish child labour in factories and mines, but it was a slow, incremental process. In Canada the DNA evidence that proved the innocence of David Milgaard, and the Montreal student massacre had similar success (although the latter, sadly, has proven vulnerable to the ideological blinkers and demagoguery of the present government). It's too soon to say with confidence that Americans have been shocked into a common-sense attitude towards guns by last week's massacre, but present evidence and pronouncements by previously committed supporters of the 'right' to bear arms do suggest that a sea-change in societal values might be feasible in the USA. If this does happen, it will be interesting to see whether it has any beneficial impact on the Canadian Conservative government's lassaiz-faire values and legislative actions regarding access to guns.
Unfortunately the 'right to bear arms' is so deeply engrained in American values that the nation as a whole isn't likely to change its ways. The moment of truth that Wendy and I experienced in Burlington, Vermont in 1964 when we discovered that we alone among all those present at a large dinner party of seemingly civilized staff people at the University of Vermont didn't keep a loaded handgun in our home, played a part in our decision to reject the USA as a suitable place to raise our children, to choose Edinburgh rather than Baltimore for the next phase of our family's development; that decision was entirely based on values. We simply didn't see the 'right to bear arms' as relevant to our way of life. Most Americans seem to regard it as profoundly important: an integral aspect of survival strategy, or akin to religious beliefs, or both. There were other reasons why we turned our backs on the USA in the mid 1960s, but the gun culture, the resort to guns as the best way to solve problems, the last resort in all other civilized nations but the first for many Americans, was a powerfully persuasive reason for Wendy and me to leave behind the higher salary, material comforts, and career opportunities, to embrace instead the rugged, more spartan and financially constrained conditions of academic and social life in Edinburgh.
If indeed the American people are more hospitable this week than they previously were to the notion of some restraint on untrammelled access to assault rifles, rifles fitted with grenade launchers forsooth, then this will be a vivid illustration of how suddenly societal values can change. It's usually a slower process, but there have been past examples of sudden value changes when a single event shocks an entire population into awareness that past values and behaviours must change. The Earl of Shaftesbury and other social reformers in 19th century England achieved success in the campaign to abolish child labour in factories and mines, but it was a slow, incremental process. In Canada the DNA evidence that proved the innocence of David Milgaard, and the Montreal student massacre had similar success (although the latter, sadly, has proven vulnerable to the ideological blinkers and demagoguery of the present government). It's too soon to say with confidence that Americans have been shocked into a common-sense attitude towards guns by last week's massacre, but present evidence and pronouncements by previously committed supporters of the 'right' to bear arms do suggest that a sea-change in societal values might be feasible in the USA. If this does happen, it will be interesting to see whether it has any beneficial impact on the Canadian Conservative government's lassaiz-faire values and legislative actions regarding access to guns.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Annual Report 2012
Adhering to a family custom that dates back over 50 years, I composed a brief report of the highlights of 2012, illustrated with photos and a picture of the cover of a book that's coming out in February 2013. I posted this to 35-40 people, and emailed roughly 200 more. The pictures didn't come through in the email version, so here they are again in this blog post:
Annual Report
Annual Report
I hope 2012 has been a happy year for you and all your
family.
It’s been a good year for me. One unexpected happy event was announced in a
phone call in late May. On a day of many irritating phone calls the phone rang yet
again. “Call display” revealed that a government official was calling;
fortunately I didn’t snarl but answered politely. The call came from Rideau
Hall, home of the Governor General of Canada; his secretary was calling to
inform me that I was to be admitted as an Officer of the Order of Canada, in
recognition of my contributions to public health and epidemiology. This led to
much rejoicing, but also sadness that my beloved Wendy wasn’t here to share the
glory. The public announcement came on June 30 and the investiture followed on
23 November.
 |
| John celebrating at the investiture, November 23 2012 |
No exotic travels in 2012, just two short out of town trips. I flew to Waterloo on Bearskin Airlines with
its evocative list of destinations in remote parts of this huge province of
Ontario, to perform for this year’s intake of MPH students; and I flew to
Toronto where Karen Trollope Kumar met me, drove me to Hamilton whence we had
two trips to the Shaw Festival Theatre in Niagara on the Lake.
Finally, another book has my name on the cover and the title
page:
Several years ago I signed a contract with Oxford University
Press to write a descendent of Public Health
and Human Ecology. Aware that I’ve fallen behind the growing edge of public
health sciences, I recruited Frank White and Lorann Stallones as co-authors.
Then Wendy fell ill. For over a year I was preoccupied caring for her, and for
many months after she died I was mourning her, in a state of mind akin to
depression. I’d written first drafts of 2 of the 4 chapters I had originally
agreed to contribute, and left it to Frank and Lorann to close the gaps. I
think they have done a splendid job and the finished work will come out early
in 2013.
My warmest seasonal greetings to you and yours, as ever,
John
11A/300 Queen Elizabeth
Drive, Ottawa, Ontario CANADA K1S 3M6
jmlast@uottawa.ca or oldwhitebeard@gmail.com http://lastswords.blogspot.com
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