Life in Edinburgh, 1965-1969

This week I received the University of Edinburgh’s Annual Review where my name appears on the list of donors. I gave some money to the Usher Institute of Public Health in memory of Wendy. It’s a fitting gift. My memories of our Edinburgh years owe everything to Wendy for making that time so perfect, despite continuing money worries: we were "house poor" - bought a home slightly beyond our means, so had to scrimp and save in other ways, but didn't really, so we always knew it couldn't go on like that forever. Those years consolidated my academic reputation and our family life was so happy it was described by friends as idyllic. We had a superb home that attracted visitors from all over the world.  The section of my memoirs on our eventful years in Edinburgh runs to about 25,000 words. Here are some edited excerpts that describe our home and family life.

We flew out of Montreal (the nearest international airport to Burlington) across the Atlantic to Prestwick and went on by train to Edinburgh, on April 1-2, 1965. It was an easy migration compared to the earlier one by sea across the Pacific, an overnight flight and a short train ride. Wendy and I had firm convictions about professional and cultural gains: We had both lived previously in Edinburgh, she for over a year, I for about 4 months. I was familiar with and confident about the academic setting in which I would be working, and both of us thought we knew the country and its people. Our move was easy because to some extent we had been living almost out of suitcases since we arrived in the USA. We had acquired little that we could not discard and we had put down no roots. It was quick and clean, though not perfectly clean, thanks to Rebecca’s airsickness and temporary separation from her suitcase and clean clothes.

At first the adjustment was harder than we had expected. We discovered that there were subtle cultural and behavioural differences between the Scots and the English, with whom at first we identified more closely. In that respect Scotland was a foreign country, not “coming home” to the culturally familiar setting of “English” life that we had enjoyed in our year in London in 1961-62 and I had experienced in London 10 years earlier. However, by the time we left Edinburgh five years later we had long since got over adjusting and had begun to feel more Scottish than English. That feeling has grown stronger with time and many return visits to the UK. 

 Our Edinburgh home from Braidburn Park and from Greenbank Crescent.

 The allotments in the Park were removed during our first winter, as shown in the next photos.

 Winter snow on the Pentland Hills

 

We soon settled in and after we bought our lovely home at 5 Greenbank Crescent in Morningside and acquired a few bits of furniture, our roots began to penetrate the secure and friendly Scottish soil.  Rebecca and David went to school and after recovering from the shock of segregation into separate playgrounds for girls and boys, they began to do well and to acquire the soft,  attractive Edinburgh burr in their speech and, more important, the foundations of an excellent education. Our home was superbly situated, backing on to Braidburn Park, with acres of rolling parkland over the hedge at the bottom of our garden, a bubbling, gurgling little burn (stream) for the children to play in, and a splendid view south to the Pentland Hills. It was in many ways the best home we ever had, and in many ways our years there were the best, undoubtedly the most family-oriented of our lives. I have nothing but pleasurable memories of that period of our home and family life. Sometimes I wonder why we ever left the lovely city of Edinburgh. I'm sure if we had stayed another 2-3 years we'd never have left there!

 Wendy, Rebecca and David at a farm, East Lothian

 D & R beside Forth rail bridge

 Wendy and Jonathan beside Firth of Forth

Those were years in which reading aloud from the children’s classics was a regular and for me perhaps more than for the children, a wonderful experience, bonding us as well as giving me the excuse to reread Winnie the Pooh, The Magic Pudding, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, Treasure Island, then, finally and new to me, The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring. By the time we came to that, both Rebecca and David were reading very well themselves and were too impatient to await the family readings together in the evenings, so they took off on their own. These books, part of the family heritage, had mostly come with us from Australia across the Pacific then across the Atlantic.  Now we sent for several more boxes of books that we had left behind in Australia and a few pieces of furniture, a child sized seagrass chair, the desk my mother had commissioned to be made for me to use in my consulting room when I was a family doctor, a mirror I had bought at the Angorichna TB sanatorium in the Flinders Ranges, and a few other bits and pieces.

 David on wharf at Dunbar Harbour

 Our VW camper van, snugly housing all of us on a bleak day beside Loch Lomond

(below)

Migrating with a family is difficult enough, migrating with a large library is even harder, but books are such an essential part of our lives that gathering them together again under one roof was like a family reunion. Recovering those books and putting up shelves on which to place them made 5 Greenbank Crescent feel like home. Like other houses along Greenbank Crescent, ours had a ground floor front parlour for best behaviour when visitors called.  We also had a much nicer ground floor living room with wide bow windows facing Braidburn Park and the Pentland Hills. Because this room faced south it got all the sunshine, especially in winter when the sun was low in the sky.  We furnished this with comfortable chairs and a battered Victorian chaise longue that we bought for a few shillings in a lane sale. In our first Edinburgh winter, a bonding experience for Wendy and me was the many hours we spent re-upholstering this, and it became precious despite being uncomfortable to sit on. We brought it along with other furniture to Canada. We lived and entertained innumerable visitors in that room. We turned the front parlour into a children’s playroom where we had a rope ladder and trapeze suspended from the ceiling, a model speed car circuit on a trestle table, and numerous toys scattered all about. It was a very popular room among our children and their playmates. The kitchen had a window looking out on the park too and a second toilet and wash basin by the back door. Next to the kitchen was a large dining room with a coke stove and an overhead clothes drying rack, very desirable in the damp Scottish climate. A small room opening off the dining room had been used by the previous owner as a dark room for photography; it became a dumping place for many things. A cupboard under the stairs was another storage area.  Upstairs were our bedroom and David’s with windows facing Braidburn Park, Rebecca’s large bedroom with its own hand-basin and a distant view of Edinburgh Castle, a smaller bedroom for Jonathan, and a spacious bathroom. At the top of the stairs was a huge, lofty skylight which we enclosed with corrugated perspex sheeting in the vain hope of reducing heat loss into that high empty space after we put in a gas furnace and hot water radiators to make the bedrooms less frigid in winter. Altogether our home had about 4000 square feet, the most we ever had I believe. There was space between the upstairs ceilings and the peaked slate roof for several more rooms, and some homes identical to ours on Greenbank Crescent had undergone this conversion. We might have done this too if we had stayed there for life, perhaps to create a self-contained part of the house that we could have rented to generate income, but we didn’t and nor so far have other owners who followed us. 

Rebecca with Boomer

We acquired other things that bonded us as a family: a Volkswagen camper bus that held all of us sleeping under the one roof so we could go off together on exploratory camping holidays; and we acquired a dog, Boomer, an adorable Labrador puppy who soon grew into a large, exuberant dog requiring huge amounts of exercise that exhausted us but left him always ready for more. Later that would become a problem.

 View from Rebecca's window to Edinburgh Castle

Edinburgh has so much to offer! It is an ancient and beautiful city, rich in history and tradition, capital city of Scotland, attracting tourists from all over the world. The outstanding, venerable medical school attracts aspiring and established scholars from around the world. Consequently in our Edinburgh years many visitors came to our home and to my office in the Usher Institute. We should have kept a visitors book, but we didn’t even think of the idea until we had left for the academic and tourist backwater of Ottawa five years later. We have rich memories and photos of many who visited us. We were never lonely in Edinburgh, thanks to the steady succession of visitors. And of course we made lasting friendships among our neighbours.

Mini-regatta on the Braid burn

Our cultural life blossomed through membership and regular attendance at the Traverse Theatre, then in its early days, based in a tiny loft near the upper end of the Royal Mile a couple hundred meters below the Castle. We were there during the great years of the Traverse Theatre, years that saw the opening performance of plays by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, and the beginning of the careers of actors who became world famous.  Margaret (later Maggie) Smith, Michael Caine and Nichol Williamson were the best known. Rebecca and David went to a Saturday morning theatre school for a while, and had drama lessons, though it didn’t help them to become actors, from Margaret (Maggie) Smith.  The theatre held fewer than 100 people, and at intermissions the audience, actors and members of the theatre staff rubbed shoulders quite literally, quaffing ale together. It was a unique and wonderful theatrical experience. 

 Wendy and kids at Dirleton Castle ruins

 With Ray Last at an Oast House, Prestonpans, East Lothian

We explored the British Isles in our VW camper bus, but we more often headed south than north after a few discouraging experiences with Scottish mists, torrential rains and swarms of midges. It was easy on our summer holidays to get across the Channel, cruise in the camper bus along the road beside the Rhine and cross the Alps into Italy where we camped twice in summer on a wide sandy Adriatic beach near Venice. We explored the Scottish Borders and a little of the West of Scotland south to Galloway and as far as the northern end of Loch Long, north of Loch Lomond; we went south into England through Stratford to the New Forest, Stow on the Wold and Bourton on the Water in the Cotswolds, and another time we went all the way to Cornwall and Land’s End. We went to London a few times too. There were innumerable day trips to favourite places near Edinburgh, Dunbar and Tantallon Castle on the North Sea coast south of the Firth of Forth, the ruins of Dirleton Castle east of Edinburgh, across the Firth of Forth into Fifeshire to St. Andrews where the children were more impressed by the sinister bottle dungeon than by the Royal and Ancient Gold Club. All we missed were the northern Highlands, but that was a big miss of course. The furthest north we got was only a little way past Pitlochry, and on the west, the country north of Loch Lomond and glimpses of the Isle of Iona. We never got to the Isle of Skye or the Great Glen (Loch Ness).

 Tantallon Castle ruins and Bass Rock

 Looking north along Loch Lomond

Wendy and kids, Princes Street, Edinburgh, 1969

John, Wendy and Jonathan on a windy Autumn day,

about October 1969 shortly before leaving Edinburgh

Because more people were leaving than arriving in Scotland, furniture was cheap. Very good quality but battered chairs, tables, etc, were available at "Lane Sales" where dealers got rid of less than perfect pieces at ridiculously low prices. We got a splendid dining table with extra leaves to seat up to 16 people, and chairs to go with it, for 5 pounds and a lovely piano for 10 shillings. We brought the piano to Canada but unfortunately its hammers and other essential moving parts were glued together, and in the harsh extreme Ottawa climate the glue dried out, fractured, and the piano's innards disintegrated. We gave it to friends who wanted to use the frame to display indoor plants, and bought another piano so Wendy could continue to play.


I'll say more about my professional activities in Edinburgh and elsewhere in the UK, the beginning of my 'international' life, and about our travels in those years, in future posts.

Values

In previous posts I’ve remarked how values differ. For instance, Wendy and I had different values from our friends in Vermont, who believed in the “Right to bear arms,” expressed by keeping a loaded handgun in the home.  I got interested in values and their influence on health related behavior in 1960 when I began to study social and cultural determinants of health. I defined values in the Dictionary of Epidemiology: “What we believe in, what we hold dear about the way we live. Our values influence our behavior as individuals, groups, communities, cultures – perhaps as a species. Values therefore are an important determinant of individual and community health; they are difficult to measure objectively, except unobtrusively.”  What I meant by this  last statement  is that interviews or questionnaires aimed at eliciting values often yield misleading results, whereas observing ways people behave is more likely to reflect their values quite accurately. When discussing values with medical students I sometimes made a loose distinction between moral values and social values.  Moral values include fundamental beliefs such as the sanctity of life (almost instinctively we try to save life when it is endangered); the incest taboo; and a set of beliefs and behaviors related to family and personal relationships, especially those involving sexual relationships. Values related to sexuality and behaviors that express these values have changed dramatically in my lifetime.  Social values are expressed in ways we conduct everyday life. Perhaps social values are arranged along a continuum with belief that excretory functions require privacy and fastidious conduct near one end, attitudes towards disposal of domestic waste, sharing scarce resources, courtesy and friendliness towards neighbors, workplace colleagues, fellow road users, etc, elsewhere along this continuum. Some values and behaviors of individuals and small groups undergo a change in large gatherings such as political rallies and crowds of spectators at sporting events; in these settings, inhibitions which prevent or restrict violent and antisocial behavior can be overcome, mob rule and riotous conduct unthinkable in everyday circumstances can occur, can even become the norm. 

Reflecting on what I’ve observed and know (or think I know) about my own and my family members’ values and behavior, I am aware of changes in my own values over time, differences between my values and those of some family members, differences in values from one generation to the next and differences among otherwise similar individuals who have had almost identical experience. Obvious value differences that most people can recognize are reflected in religious affiliation and political preferences. Another that crops up in conversations among intimate friends is existence in some but not others of prejudices such as racism and homophobia, revealed in comments about people who are visibly different, or people whose behavior suggests that their sexual orientation differs from the majority. 

When discussing health related values and behavior with students, I describe the cigarette-friendly atmosphere of my youth: almost everybody smoked in those days, and offering a cigarette when introduced to strangers was a token of friendship. We smoked during lectures and had ashtrays on the backs of the seats in front of us in the medical school auditorium. This set of values has been transformed in recent decades.  Ashtrays have almost become collector’s items, and it has become as unthinkable to smoke without permission in someone else’s home as it would be to urinate or spit on the carpet. Generation differences are even more striking. In my grandparents’ childhood it was acceptable for some people to keep other people as slaves. When my mother was a young woman, she and all other women were denied the right to vote which was restricted to men. When I was a young man some crimes (such as a group of offenses called "juvenile delinquency") were punished by flogging, which had been carried out in public until a few decades earlier; and execution by hanging was the usual punishment for murder. 

As a child of divorced parents in the early 1930s, I felt stigmatized, and to some extent I was. Children born out of wedlock were bastards and it was unacceptable for unmarried couples to live together. A few years ago at a dinner party, two women about 30 years my junior described how they had moved in to live with men to whom they felt attracted. One had eventually married the man, the other still lived with her man but remained unmarried because her independence was more important to her than the ‘respectability’ of marriage. They had two children and she thought these children should share any eventual decision about marriage. Familial arrangements like this were unimaginable when I was young. Variations in family formation  and function reflect values – family values, in contrast to the ‘Family Values’ touted by those I describe as ‘religious fascists’ – a term that reveals my own values and prejudices I suppose.

Having described how values change, can I offer any ideas about reasons why they change? I mentioned that some of my own values have changed over the course of my lifetime. I converted like Saul on the road to Damascus from male chauvinism to card carrying feminism while I was on the staff of the University of Edinburgh in 1965-69. I was principal investigator in several research projects for the UK Royal Commission on Medical Education. One project was a cohort study of about 1700 medical students throughout the UK whose progress I followed for seven years. This study revealed several interesting facts, one of which was the existence of a very uneven playing field. Girls and young women who aspired to a medical career had to overcome formidable obstacles. Their parents and school teachers often discouraged them from even considering a medical career and selection committees at many medical schools discriminated against admitting women. Therefore, to be admitted to medical school women had to be very highly motivated and required better academic grades than men. Consequently in medical school, they performed better than the men, got significantly more prizes and distinctions. Despite this, discrimination against women continued beyond graduation, especially if they married, and most of all if they had a child or children, when it was often very difficult for them to get good training posts that would advance their careers. My sense of social justice was so outraged by this that I eagerly joined forces with two women doctors who had achieved positions of power and influence, and helped them to design plans to level the playing field. Among other things, they set up part-time residency training programs for women able only to work part time while raising infants and small children.

My sense of social justice was part of my values. Whence did this come? It dates back as far as I can remember to early childhood, which accords with observations by child psychologists and others who have identified recognition by children as young as 6 years of ‘right’ and’ wrong’ and ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ treatment.  The consensus seems to be that it is an innate behavioral pattern.  The Earl of Shaftesbury, the 19^th Century British social reformer who worked tirelessly to abolish child labor in factories and mines, would not have been able to enact legislation if his parliamentary colleagues had not shared similar values, or developed these values under the influence of his eloquence and advocacy. I am not up to date in this field. I hope some of the readers of this blog might comment on current work on determinants of human values, particularly on the extent to which values are ‘hard wired’ into the human genome and brain or acquired as a result of parental or social conditioning. One reason I’m sorry my life and career are fast approaching the end is that I’d like to explore this fascinating aspect of human character and personalities in greater depth. There is much yet to be discovered.

University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, 1964-65

The following is edited excerpts from my memoirs, written about 1990-91

Late on a February afternoon in 1964 Kerr White met me at the airport in Burlington, Vermont.

Almost the first thing he said to me was “Don’t unpack; we’re all moving to Johns Hopkins.” What a thrill it was to hear that! I had come half way across the world to work with a man I hardly knew, whose reputation had been enough to attract me; but I could not have imagined that he would be of such stature as to command a position as a department chairman at one of the best medical schools in the world. It was the first American medical school I had heard of because a novel about Johns Hopkins medical students had influenced my decision to study medicine.  My first few days at the University of Vermont passed in a bit of a dream, made more pleasant by the expedition to Boston to collect Wendy and the children from the Port Alfred which had berthed there by this time.  The flights to and from Boston were bumpy. The flight back, with a stop at Montpelier where we hit a deer on the runway and which was rough enough so that everybody except I got airsick, was quite unpleasant. But soon we were all safe and sound in the soothing hands of Isobel White. The warmth of her personality and her hospitality provided welcome reassurance about our future. 

Part of University of Vermont Campus

Within days we were installed in a large apartment at 54 Brookes Avenue and beginning to get established in our new home and new land. On the day we moved into our apartment it became bone-chillingly cold and stayed that way. Soon we had lots of snow. The winter clothing we had brought from Australia was hopelessly inadequate and our children were crying and distressed when we walked a few hundred yards to the Lake Champlain shore to see the ice-bound lake. Our highest priority was to get suitable gear for life in a really cold winter.   

54 Brookes Avenue; our apartment was ground floor, near side

My colleagues were pleasant and friendly. Wendy was taken to the bosoms of their families so warm-heartedly that we had no time to feel homesick, hardly ever had time to think about all that we had left behind in Australia.  Work with Kerr White was disorganized by the impending move and soon I learned that there was disquiet in the department, a credibility problem that had I known of it, might have been enough to deter us from forsaking everything we had in Australia to hitch our wagons to this particular star. Kerr White had a history of frequent moves and no one was sure that the impending move to Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health would be his final one.

But here we were, settled however uneasily in the USA. I started working on two of Kerr White’s research projects aimed at assessing part of the process and outcome of primary medical care. In the spring I visited the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, jumped through the right hoops successfully and was offered a position as a member of Kerr White's team when we all moved to Baltimore. I met some leading American epidemiologists, notably Philip Sartwell whom I later followed as the editor in chief of the Maxcy-Rosenau textbook of public health, and Abe Lilienfeld, perhaps the most eminent epidemiologist in America with whom I also later worked closely. 

Roadside Produce, Northern Vermont 

I travelled all over Vermont which was enjoyable as travel but less so professionally, trying to persuade suspicious and sometimes hostile physicians who had been alienated by Kerr White’s undiplomatic approach, that they should collaborate in a multicentre study of outcomes of various kinds of interventions. My task of winning over some of the family doctors was not made easier by Kerr White’s abrupt and, most believed, unjustifiable closure of the community free clinic for indigent families in Burlington that had been conducted since Depression years by the university department he headed.

Meantime, conversations with my colleagues disclosed the fact that none of them would be going to Johns Hopkins with him. I would be the only one. I had many misgivings about moving our fragile little family from the tranquillity of the small city of Burlington to the large and at that time violent conurbation of Baltimore/Washington. There was an air of unreality about my house-hunting expedition when an indifferent real estate agent showed me a series of improbable houses where we might live, far outside the Baltimore beltway in the hinterland between Baltimore and Washington.  In Burlington I had a five minute walk to the office along pleasant streets lined with elm and maple trees. I would have to commute for 1-2 hours daily each way from a remote home to the School of Hygiene in the slums of Baltimore and we would need two cars or Wendy would be housebound while I was at work.

Beaver dam, beaver house, David standing guard

One Saturday in early summer of 1964 we were about to set off for a sightseeing drive when I heard the phone ringing as I was getting into the car with the family already on board. I almost didn’t bother going back inside, but when I picked up the receiver I was astonished to hear Stuart Morrison’s soft Scottish voice. He was calling from the University of Edinburgh where he had recently been appointed to the chair of social medicine. He was calling to ask if I would be interested in coming to the Usher Institute of Public Health in Edinburgh to join his department as the top senior lecturer. I almost accepted on the spot over the phone! It was a rescue from a fate worse than death because by now there were other grounds for disquiet about life in the United States. There were important value-related aspects of life that made us feel sure we didn’t want to live permanently in the USA and didn’t want our children to become Americans.

Hostilities were heating up in Vietnam in 1964. My colleagues, like most Americans at that time, believed they were on the right side, that the Vietnam War had to be fought and won to defeat “communist aggression.”  The Vietnam War was not recognized as the anti-colonial conflict that it really was. We became aware of other flaws in the American way of life.. We were uneasy about the militarist attitudes that pervaded society. There was a widespread belief that war with the USSR was inevitable and should be encouraged and initiated sooner rather than later. Aggression and resort to violence rather than negotiation to solve problems are allied to the “right to bear arms” – a belief as devoutly held as religious faith by many millions of Americans – and in the high frequency of gun crimes. (We arrived in the USA only three months after the assassination of President John F Kennedy). One evening at a small party with other university faculty members the conversation turned to guns and it emerged that Wendy and I were the only ones there who didn’t keep a loaded handgun in the house for “self-protection!” This was in a small university city with very little crime. We found that conversation very disturbing: this was not the sort of society or culture that appealed to us. We were appalled by the profligacy and waste. Many Americans were obese: they ate enormous meals, took home from supermarkets more than twice as much food each week as we did, much of it junk food. They drove huge cars, often very short distances that could as readily have been covered on foot. Obesity was a common result of the profligacy and sloth. Waste was its pernicious by-product. The weekly garbage included huge quantities not only of good food but also domestic appliances, clothing, shoes, all of which could be passed on to the needy. Corruption, disguised as contributions to re-election campaign expenses, pervades all levels of the body politic and is accepted as a fact of life rather than opposed as an evil to be overcome.  The consequence is almost complete control of the political agenda by influential special interest lobby groups. Subtle and not so subtle pressures were applied to us to proclaim our religious affiliation. Everyone we met assumed that like all good Americans we believed in god, that god gave this bountiful land to Americans, and that they have a manifest destiny to convert others to their way of life. Atheism and agnosticism were regarded almost as perversions. Our friends all assumed therefore, that we would join a church and that we would begin as soon as we could the process of becoming American citizens. Some of our friends could not conceal their perplexity when we said we would not be taking American citizenship and didn’t go to church. The religious fascism that is apparent in the early 21^st century was less obvious in the 1960s but was there in incipient form. We found, and in all the years since, have continued to find that the USA is a culturally shallow nation compared to Britain and Europe, and in some respects, notably TV and radio, even compared to Canada and Australia.  Fortunately we were close enough to the border to pick up Canadian TV on our cable, and this carried some familiar British programs as well as thoughtful Canadian content.  Within a few months of our arrival in Vermont we had settled happily and had made many friends but knew we did not want to stay permanently in America.  When I was offered the post as senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Wendy and I agreed without hesitation that we would rather live there than in the USA even though I would be earning much less and Britain remained at that time stuck in the remains of post-war austerity.  We were repelled by the violence, the corruption, the profligacy, the militarism; we hankered for the familiar values of the UK.

 468 North Street, Burlington (we had the ground floor)

Kerr White had given me a small travel budget. In July 1964 I used a little of this to fly to Britain to confer with colleagues there about the research I was doing on medical care in Vermont, and to visit Edinburgh to follow up on Stuart Morrison’s invitation. I flew across the Atlantic for the first of many times, went to a couple of scientific meetings, called on a few experts in London, and went on to Edinburgh, where a few days discussions with Stuart Morrison and Sir John Brotherston (Chief Medical Officer for Scotland) and meetings with staff in the Usher Institute sufficed to persuade me that Edinburgh would be a grand place for the children and for us all to live, and a splendid place for me to work. We would emigrate again, reverse the flow of the brain drain from Britain to the USA. My name appeared in a news item in the Lancet as an example of reverse brain drain, one of several ways in which I have made my mark on the world.

Rural Vermont, early fall, 1964

Once we had made this decision and I had broken the news to Kerr White, the rest of our time in Vermont was delightful. It is a lovely part of the USA, a quiet backwater in those times before it became the haven of liberal Democrats that it has been since the 1980s. It has an old-world charm, a quality I described in the Peripatetic Correspondent’s column in the Lancet. 

 Swimming in Lake Champlain, Summer 1964

Like England and Western Europe, Vermont has a true four seasons climate with clear and obvious distinction between seasons. With Kerr White’s approval I used the travel budget (the rules were more easy-going in those days) to take Wendy with me to New York where the American Public Health Association met that year. We explored this great city briefly and superficially from the famous old Chelsea Hotel in Greenwich Village, far removed from the mid-town hotels where the meetings were going on. Later in the summer I used more of the travel budget, with Kerr’s encouragement, to attend and present a paper at the congress of the International Epidemiological Association that was held in Princeton, New Jersey. Informal discussions at that IEA meeting about the inconsistency of terms we use in epidemiology were the first seminal event that led ultimately to development of the Dictionary of Epidemiology that consolidated my academic reputation. 

Vera Last with Wendy and Jonathan

In the summer of 1964 we moved to 468 North Street where we had the entire ground floor of a well-equipped house, distinguished by a shower stall with jets coming out sideways as well as from above and large enough for the entire family, where several of us often showered together. My mother came over from Adelaide to stay with us, and we took her around a bit, but it was a stressful visit because she was often clingy and tearful when alone with me.

 Fall colors beginning in the Green Mountains of Vermont

We explored Vermont and nearby parts of upstate New York across Lake Champlain, New Hampshire and adjoining parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts in our Volkswagen bus.  Kerr White’s research and development grants enabled me to attend professional meetings in New York, Chicago and Washington, and through his colleagues and contacts I was invited to give seminars or lectures in Boston, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Chapel Hill North Carolina, New Haven Connecticut, Ann Arbor Michigan, Dartmouth New Hampshire, and Waterville Maine. Mostly I flew to these cities but drove to the nearer ones. Two or three times when bad weather grounded flights, I took the train. So I saw quite a lot of the USA east of the Mississippi in all four seasons. In many places it remains beautiful, but blighted industrial wastelands disfigure some once beautiful landscapes and have destroyed many life-sustaining ecologically sensitive coastal wetlands; and peri-urban sprawl has eaten away at farmland and pasture around all the major cities. I recall once flying out of Washington National Airport (now Ronald Reagan Airport) and looking down on mile after mile of new housing developments with large sprawling mansions, each on a large lot with its own driveway to a three-car garage, its own swimming pool. From above the sight resembled the image under a microscope of a spreading cancer, a vivid metaphor of humanity as a malignant growth on the earth.  

Our kids enjoying winter snows in Vermont

Our photos record our adventures: we went sugar-bushing and saw maple syrup being made; we picnicked and paddled in brooks in the beautiful Green Mountains that give the state its name, and beside Lake Champlain in sticky summer heat, saw the breathtaking beauty of fall colours, were guests of neighbours at the unique American festival of Thanksgiving, enjoyed the deep snow and biting cold of winter. We skated and used wind-power and an umbrella to propel a toboggan carrying our children on the ice in a bay on Lake Champlain. Our improvised ice yacht sailed faster than I expected and almost got away, could have carried the kids far out on the ice if I hadn’t made a terrific effort and caught up with it. We found an unforgettable restaurant, the Harbor Hideaway, where there was a museum full of oddities for children to explore while their parents ate moderately good food. We visited the Shelbourne Museum in South Burlington which had a fascinating collection of colonial and early American memorabilia, displayed in houses of lovely period architecture.

 Our patented ice yacht

                                         

                      On the toboggan slope

Leaving Vermont was, after all, quite hard. We had made good friends, some who stayed there all their lives, others scattered about the world. I have retained professional contact with some, including Kerr White who has been very good to me, notably by appointing me to edit the Dictionary of Epidemiology. We are on good terms. We respect and like each other with no hard feelings either way. The other distinguished University of Vermont faculty member with whom I continue to enjoy a close working relationship is Jack Bryant. He was then associate dean of the medical school and left to join the staff of the Rockefeller Foundation, then became professor of community health sciences at the Aga Khan University in Karachi and an eminent medical ethicist, and re-entered my life again in that role in the late 1980s and has become a good friend.

 Sugar house in operation

 Collecting maple sap

 Spring thaw