The most important event in my life – an utterly random event –
took place about 9 a.m. on Sunday September 25, 1955. I was off duty in the
group medical practice where I was the most junior doctor. I was looking
forward to playing golf with three friends at a modest golf links on the
southern outskirts of Adelaide, South Australia.
It was a lovely spring morning, sun shining, flowers blooming,
almond blossom bursting forth, paddocks painted yellow with sour-sobs or purple
with Salvation Jane, song-birds nesting, magpies yodeling, kookaburras laughing
crazily.
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| Almond blossom and sour sobs, September 1955 Southern outskirts of Adelaide |
In the small hours of the previous night I’d delivered a baby in
a cottage hospital on the far fringes of our practice catchment area. I went
back first thing Sunday morning to make sure mother and baby were both OK. Because of my detour to that cottage hospital I
was approaching my golf links on a road I’d never used before to get there, running about an hour late.
Soon after I set off on that unaccustomed road, I picked up two
hitch hikers. In those days not long after the end of the war and of petrol
rationing, we picked up hitch hikers. I had hitch hiked in England a year or two
before and I was fond of the custom.
These two introduced themselves: Louise Zuhrer from Zurich,
Switzerland and Jan Wendelken from Christchurch, New Zealand. They were nurses
who had just completed a year at Princess Margaret Rose Children’s Hospital in
Perth, Western Australia. They intended to explore as much as they could of
Australia in 6 weeks before returning to their homelands.
Jan, the fair-haired New Zealand girl with glasses, had smiled
at me as she got into my car, a smile like no other I had ever seen, a smile
that bathed me in its warmth and sincerity. She began to talk about her hitch
hiking experiences, both recently in Australia, and on her travels in Europe
and the UK. Her happy chatter communicated to me that she was a special person,
that fate had been unusually kind to me by bringing us together that morning.
“This is cosy! Much better than the cab of a lorry, we can hear
each other talk, have a real conversation,” Jan said. She went on: “My
room-mate Pearl and I hitched all over Europe; most of our lifts were in
lorries or trucks, and they were always too noisy to hear each other.”
“Where are you heading today?” I asked. Jan replied, “Mount
Gambier; the Blue Lake. This week it’s supposed to have its annual colour
change and we want to see it.”
“You’re on the wrong road,” I said. “I’ll take you as far as a
corner about ten minutes along from here, you can cut across to the road you
need from there.”
But in the 10 minutes we took to reach that corner I was so
captivated by Jan that instead of dropping them I offered to drive them myself.
I said:
“My friends will have given up waiting for me an hour ago, and gone ahead
without me. They’re used to my golf being pre-empted by medical emergencies. If
you like I’ll show you the country south of here, take you back to Adelaide,
then you can set off for Mount Gambier tomorrow.”
I spent the day showing them the lovely dairy farming and wine
growing country between Adelaide and the south coast. It was the most magical day of my life. Everything
sparkled in the sunshine, and so did our conversation as we told each other who
we were, what we had done with our lives to that point, what we hoped for in
the future.
Jan had more to say about her hitch hiking adventures. “Hitching
in Europe with my friend Pearl, we mostly got lifts with lorry drivers, almost
all decent chaps. We had to run for it to get away from a pair of amorous
Italians outside Milan but there’s safety in numbers; we often joined forces
with other hitch hikers. Also Pearl and I aren’t exactly beautiful and we did our
best to look dowdy and unattractive.” I held my tongue, although I didn’t agree
that Jan was unattractive.
“Once when I was working in Edinburgh and had gone south to see
friends in London my purse was stolen so I had no money, no return train
ticket, had to hitch back on my lonesome. A truck driver took too much interest
in my legs, tried to fondle my knees. We were on a by-pass around Durham. I
said, ‘That’s Durham Cathedral isn’t it? I’ve always wanted to see that
cathedral. So I’ll hop out here.’ Before he could grab me, I opened the door
and jumped out.”
We began to talk about our future plans. Jan said: “When I get
home to Christchurch I’m taking a 6-month course in plastic surgery
nursing. I’ll learn how to dress severe
burns and care for skin graft patients. That sort of surgical nursing is the
kind of experience I need before I go to work in a Maori community.”
I said: “I’m the youngest doctor in a 10-man suburban group
practice, building up a practice of my own. I’m hoping to be offered a
partnership in a year or two. I’m loving it; it’s excellent experience and I
especially love house calls, seeing people in their everyday habitat. It’s a
great way to get to know and understand people. There are fascinating contrasts
between many of the ‘New Australians’ and ‘old Australians’ whose ancestors
came here from the UK or Ireland several generations ago. I wish I had time to
do research on this.”
By mid-day it was quite hot. I shed my heavy winter pullover and
rolled up my sleeves when we stopped at Yankalilla to buy pies and lemonade for
our lunch. Louise took a photo of Jan and me as we sat, earnestly talking
on the side of a hill above the beach. We were talking by then about our
hospital experiences in the UK.
“In coronation year I worked in the private wing of the Royal
Northern Hospital on Holloway Road,” Jan said. “I was just up the road!” I
said, “At the Highgate Wing of the Wittington Hospital, said to date from when
Dick Wittington was Lord Mayor of London – it looked it too!”
“Money talks,” Jan said. “The private wing of the Royal Northern
had luxurious rooms with phones and TVs, lovely new bed linen, patients got a
menu and 3-course meals. Many weren’t even sick enough to be in hospital.” She mentioned
a famous film star with gonorrhea to whom she had given Penicillin injections.
“If he wasn’t loaded with money as well as gonococci, he’d have got long-acting
Penicillin once daily as an out-patient. The rest of the Royal Northern is
pretty squalid, like your wards at the Wittington.” She was talking of conditions
in 1953: Britain was nearly bankrupt paying off war debts, divisions were
opening between the wealthy few and under-privileged masses who despite the
Welfare State, struggled to scrape by.
Meeting as we did was a gift of blind chance, a fluke, a
miracle. I was approaching my golf club on a road I'd never used before to get
there and running an hour late. Jan and
Louise were on the wrong road and over an hour later than their intended start
that day too, because the landlady of the Bed & Breakfast where they'd stayed
the previous night was sick and Jan had insisted on tidying the place, washing
their sheets and towels, getting fresh milk and bread before they set off. Jan
went up a long way in my opinion when Louise told me this. When I knew Jan better I soon got used to the
spontaneous acts of kindness to strangers that were an integral part of
her personality.
All her friends knew how her smile lit up her surroundings.
The tributes I received after she died included this: “Her smile was so
infectious! It was like a belly laugh that came from somewhere deep inside her,
a sense of joy that shone from behind her eyes. Everyone she knew basked in the
warmth of her personality and sense of (often wicked) fun.” I was instantly
enchanted by her smile when she got into my little car. When she
described some of her hitch hiking experiences as we drove on, her
irrepressible good humour and adventurous spirit 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 that hung above the
head of our bed throughout our marriage. She clearly had the same values and
beliefs as I, about what was wrong and what was right in the world. I decided then
that she was the maid for me.
When I began reading her diaries after she died, I was hoping to
find remarks that revealed her similar instant attraction to me. I didn’t find
anything that suggests such powerful emotions as I felt, but she did confess to
fondness for me in some of her letters.
In her diary for Sunday September 25, 1955, she wrote:
“A glorious day. Got
breakfast in bed for sick landlady. Took bus to Darlington. Left camera on bus!
Picked up by John Last in little Austin, drove south on coast road, lunch at
Yankalilla overlooking sea. Drove to Cape Jervis, looked over narrow sea to
Kangaroo Island. On to Victor Harbor. A beautiful drive, rolling hills, native
bush, silver and blue sea, kookaburras, rosellas, and good company. Back to
Adelaide through forested ranges, past large reservoir. Out to John Last’s
home, 238 Melbourne Street, North Adelaide. A very nice person & mother who
is most hospitable."
On that magical spring day we drove eventually to Victor Harbor,
where a little island is connected to the mainland by a causeway along which an
antique horse-drawn tram trundles bumpily back and forth during the tourist
season. Not that day though, it was too early in the year for the tourist
season. So we walked across the causeway and around the island, gazing at huge
ocean breakers all the way from Antarctica, dodging the spray as they beat
against the rocks on the exposed southern side of the island.
On the way back to Adelaide the two girls were singing as we drove
along, and I joined in with my hopelessly out of tune voice. By then I knew I
definitely wanted to see much more of Jan. Before we parted at the end of
the day we exchanged addresses, promising to write to each other. My first letter to her, timed to welcome her
home, revealed the emotional impact on me of meeting her: “I have
thought of you often in the last few weeks… That was one of the happiest days I
can remember… you and Louise (especially you) were two of the most delightful
and charming girls I have ever met. I am deeply thankful for the odd way
of chance, or fate, that took me along that rather out of the way route to the
golf links just at the moment you were waiting for some kind stranger to pass
by. I wish you didn’t live so far away though! I’d dearly love to
see more of you, get to know you a whole lot better than was possible in a
day.”
Jan wrote her first letter to me on the ship that took her from
Sydney to Wellington, a long letter with vivid descriptions of her travels with
Louise to Alice Springs and Darwin, across to Mount Isa, Townsville and Cairns,
then south to Brisbane and Sydney where she parted from Louise. It was her second and third letters that
contained her reactions to what I’d written: “How very sweet of you to
have a welcome home letter waiting for me... “ But she showed more
caution and restraint in her letters than I did in mine, saying “I mistrust
swiftly moving events … and any sentimental or romantic thoughts, however sweet
to hear, mustn’t spoil our relationship at present.” She gave me renewed
hope in her third letter, paradoxically complained that she’d waited a long time to hear again
from me: “For three weeks I have been eagerly scanning the letter rack
and I had convinced myself that our correspondence had died a natural
death…. It makes me so happy to hear from you.” (The reason for
the gap in our correspondence – the only gap – was an epidemic of respiratory
infections that had all of us in the Western Clinic running off our feet from
dawn until late at night).
I didn’t even try to suppress the attraction I felt, attraction
that grew stronger as her letters eloquently displayed her command of language,
her wit and intellect, her empathy for others, and most important, her interest
in me, and as our letters continued, her affection for me. Soon we were writing to each other twice a
week, sometimes more often.
Some members of the Wendelken family were nicknamed Wendy;
during our exchange of letters, which soon evolved into something like a 19th
century epistolary courtship, Jan became Wendy. She was Wendy ever afterwards
to me and to my family and our friends, Janet or Jan only to her family and
childhood friends in New Zealand.
We wrote 125 increasingly affectionate letters to each other
between November 1955 and May 1956. Most ran to 8, 10, even 12 pages of closely
written hand-writing. We never ran out of things to say to each other! When
Wendy finished her plastic surgery nursing course she flew to Melbourne and I
drove over to collect her and bring her back to Adelaide. From June 1956 until
our marriage on February 14 1957 we had a more conventional courtship. Our
happy marriage lasted for almost 55 years until Wendy’s death on November 15,
2010.
Wendy was my inspiration, my moral compass, my reason for
living. Under her gentle influence, my life, our lives as a couple then as a
family, were always happy although they changed profoundly through that long
period. At the end of 1959 after much thought, not yet 3 years since we married
and with two tiny tots in tow, I left the financial security of general practice
for a precarious new career in public health science and epidemiological research. That new career took us to Sydney, then to
London, briefly back to Sydney then across the Pacific, through the Panama
Canal and up the eastern seaboard of the USA to Burlington, Vermont. A year
later we flew on to Edinburgh, Scotland, and in 1969 flew back across the
Atlantic to Ottawa, which Wendy and I thought of at the time as likely to be a
brief stop en route back to Australia or New Zealand where we wanted ultimately
to come to rest and settle down.
But in Ottawa I got drawn into the upper levels of public health
policy, not only in Canada but also in the United States, then in South and
South-East Asia and ultimately throughout the world, much of this under the
auspices of the World Health Organization.
Our early travels were leisurely sea voyages on freighters that carried
a handful of passengers – by far the best, most civilized and rewarding form of
long-distance journeying – but as the pace of my life accelerated, that relaxed
way to move about the world gave way to the rising urgency of air travel. Soon
I lost count of the number of flights I made between Ottawa and Toronto, Ottawa
and Washington, Ottawa and New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and across the
Atlantic to London, Geneva, Paris, Stockholm. From 1985 onward we had
opportunities almost every year for the next 20 to make really long-haul
flights “home” to New Zealand and Australia, sometimes there and back across
the Pacific, sometimes around the world.
After modest beginnings in Edinburgh in the late 1960s I got
involved in 1977 in writing and editing on a grand scale, when I was appointed
as editor in chief of the most widely used reference textbook of public health
and preventive medicine in the world. In 1980 I was appointed editor in chief
of the Dictionary of Epidemiology –
work that brought the most fame and gave me the greatest pleasure. This went
through four editions between 1983 and 2001, was translated into at least 15
languages and made my name known to epidemiologists all over the world. At
international meetings I felt like the Eiffel Tower because so many people wanted
to be photographed standing next to me. From the late 1970s onward I became
active in the governance of national and international associations of
specialists in my domain, mixing and mingling with the most eminent public
health specialists in the world, sometimes with cabinet ministers who trod the
corridors of power.
A few weeks before our final examinations and my graduation from
medical school in 1949, we had two lectures on medical ethics and our legal
obligations. These consisted of admonitions to keep secret what we learnt in
our encounters with patients, not to get sexually involved with them, to teach
our craft to our colleagues’ sons, and how to fill in official forms like birth
and death certificates. Like most of my classmates I didn’t take these lectures
very seriously. However I was confronted by my first ethical problem almost
before the ink was dry on my medical license to practice, as I will relate
later in these memoirs. Under Wendy’s benign influence my sense of values, my
concern for equity, fairness, and human rights were consolidated and
reinforced, became a prominent feature in the fabric of my medical persona.
Over the years I wrote and spoke publicly with increasing confidence on ethical
problems in public health and epidemiology, and took international leadership
in developing guidelines and codes of conduct on ethical aspects of
epidemiological and public health practice and research. The seeds of this
important part of my professional activities were sewn in the talk that Wendy
and I had over lunch on the day we met, and this led in time to my highest
honour, sadly too late for Wendy to share the glory. In 2012, two years after
she died, I was appointed an Officer in the Order of Canada.
All this and more followed from that chance meeting in September
1955, and from Wendy’s inspiring influence. Over the course of a long life I’ve
traveled and worked in many countries, met many interesting people, had many
interesting experiences, learnt some useful lessons that others might find
helpful. Some of this is described in my memoirs, along with
reflections on the meaning of it all.
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