After
some initial temerity I loved my life and work as a general practitioner. I loved the variety, the challenging diversity
of problems. Most of the time I loved seeing people in their natural everyday
habitat when I made house calls. It wasn’t fun when I was called out to see a
critically ill patient in a dimly lit bedroom in the middle of the night, but
fortunately crises like that were rare. About half my house calls were to see chronic
or long term sick people whom I visited regularly and got to know well as time
passed. I loved the intellectual
challenges, diagnostic labeling and therapeutic decision-making. My years in
general practice coincided with the infancy of the UK College of General
Practitioners. I became active in its South Australian chapter, and through
this I met like-minded GPs from other states and even a few from overseas. As
my intellectual horizons widened and my scholarly aspirations awakened, I began
to dream about combining general practice with an academic university based
career. Here, however, I was years ahead of my time: Adelaide, and Australia as
a whole, would not be ready for this development for 10-15 years.
In
1958 the group practice in which I was the most junior partner was hit, like
the rest of the world, by a global influenza pandemic, Asian Flu, in which 4
million people died. Like the Spanish Influenza of 1919-1920, the Asian Flu struck
hard at young adults who had not been alive to be exposed to earlier influenza
strains and therefore had not acquired partial immunity to the virus. Two young
adults the same age as me whom I knew well were struck and killed. One was a
young man who drove an ambulance and was my occasional playing partner at a
modest golf course on the southern outskirts of Adelaide. A few weeks after he
died his mother came to my office to thank me for caring for him during his
brief and terrifying terminal illness. She insisted on paying me for my
fruitless home visits and my final visit to him in the Royal Adelaide Hospital,
where I stood at his bedside and watched him die. That evening our accountant
reported on the financial returns of the previous month – our busiest and most lucrative
month ever. As my partners rejoiced, cheered and slapped each other on the
back, I saw in my mind’s eye the sad face of that woman who had insisted on
paying me for my useless visits to her doomed son. It was a moment of truth. I
knew that I could not, would not, spend my life getting rich because my
patients had the misfortune to fall ill.
 |
| Rebecca, aged 11 months, with grandfather Pop Wendelken, Picton NZ, November 1958 |
 |
| Grandma Wendy, Janet Wendy and Rebecca, Picton NZ, November 1958 |
A
few weeks later, Wendy and I and baby Rebecca, 10 months old, flew to
Christchurch New Zealand to meet her family. There I fell ill myself, not with
influenza but with a life-threatening virus pneumonia. I spent two days in an
oxygen tent inhaling a detergent mist intended to loosen the sticky mucus that was
suffocating me. Both I and the young internal medicine specialist treating me,
thought that I might die. When we returned to Adelaide I had two weeks
convalescence, leisure time to think about my life, our lives as a family: Wendy’s
life, Rebecca’s life and the life of our next baby who was a few weeks away
from being born. I could stay in general practice, get prosperous, enjoy my
work, get involved in the community more fully than I already was. Or I could
resign from the Western Clinic group practice, go to the School of Public
Health in Sydney and train to become a specialist in public health sciences,
discover and test ways to keep communities and families healthy. It meant turning my back on a secure future
and work I enjoyed and felt confident I could do well. To keep my scholarly options open I decided
to start training in public health sciences as a private student paying my own
way, rather than seeking employment in a state or Commonwealth of Australia
health department that would eventually grant me time off to undertake formal
training for the DPH, but I would be obligated to do their bidding for 5 years
or more. This meant committing my family
to a life in real poverty for several years if not longer. I soon discovered that Wendy was thoroughly
conditioned to poverty, knew how to make do with what she had. She never
complained about being hard up, indeed accepted this cheerfully as the natural
order of things. We were both Depression era children, accustomed to poverty
and penny-pinching.
When
Wendy and I talked about the options we had only vague ideas about what might ultimately
become of us. What, exactly, I would be doing, and where, were unknowable. However we agreed without hesitation that
this course of action was what we both wanted to do. Then, and countless times in the years after
we made that joint decision, I realized how blessed I was to have Wendy for my
wife. Her spirit of adventure and her sense of fun, along with her amazing
capacity to make all her own clothes, our children’s too and even some of mine,
carried us through many anxious and penurious times over those years of
precarious uncertainty.
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