unexpected and welcome benefit of OC

After the news that I had been appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada became public, there was a blizzard of emails, a hurricane of phone calls and even a few letters by old fashioned snail mail. Among all these there were a few from very old friends and former students with whom I had lost contact long ago. This was an unexpected and most welcome bonus. I think I've responded to all of these messages now, and the email addresses are safely stored in my address book.

Among those I heard from with congratulations is a frequent correspondent, my friend Ron Laporte from Pittsburgh.  Ron asked me to write a few sentences for his Supercourse newsletter. I don't think there is a copyright on the sentences I dashed off and sent straight back to him, so I'll repeat them here:

When I was a pimply 13 years old, I wanted to be a writer.  I’d read Somerset Maugham and a few others who’d moved on from medical school to become successful writers, so I decided to aim for medical school.  By the time I was 15 or 16, poised to start in medical school at 17 because there was a world war going on, I realized I couldn’t invent plots or develop characters, and had a tin ear for dialogue, so a career as a creative writer wasn’t for me. In time I became a tolerably competent clinician, then an epidemiologist.  But love of words and writing bubbled away below the surface. I found a way to combine my medical background and my love of words, composing definitions for the Dictionary of Epidemiology, the Dictionary of Public Health, writing Public Health and Human Ecology, editing Public Health and Preventive Medicine (“Maxcy-Rosenau-Last”), the Canadian Journal of Public Health, and sundry other journals and books.  During all this time, I was corrupting the innocent young minds of medical students with the subversive notion that discovering and accentuating the determinants of good health was a career aim at least as worthy as exploring arcane details of serum electrolyte levels or genomic structure of an individual patient. In part of my spare time I counseled medical students about career options, emphasizing that it is important to keep open as many options as possible for as long as possible, thereby avoiding the hazard of overspecializing. Paleontologists demonstrated that species which overspecialize risk extinction when conditions change rapidly. That can happen in medicine too. In epidemiology, it’s valuable to have more than a nodding acquaintance with the Big Picture, rather than focusing on the fine detail in one little corner of the picture.  This perspective makes it easier to connect the dots – which can come from any number of disparate scholarly and applied fields – and thereby make a new picture altogether, a picture that explains important truths which had previously been obscure and mysterious. The great discovery I have made is that it is enormous fun doing this, and even more fun when there’s an opportunity to infect students with enthusiasm to do it too.   

Perhaps the greatest privilege I enjoy is that the work I do is fun.  Only a tiny minority of humanity can honestly say this: my work is fun to do.  I wouldn't keep on doing it as I race towards my 86th birthday if it wasn't fun.