Review Tuesday: 'The Pen & the Stethoscope'

Today’s ‘Review Tuesday’. Synchronicity. Wikipedia says it’s a concept first described by Carl Jung, i.e. the experience of two or more events apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner [1]. Its meaningfulness distinguishes it from mere simultaneity. Last Thursday my cyberfriend Wordsmith [2] sent me an email titled: ‘Something fine to read’. That ‘something’ is an essay by a favourite writer of his – William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) [3] – on being a physician and a writer [4]. Williams’s essential premise is that doctors, being keen observers of all aspects of the human condition, are disposed to being writers and poets. The synchronicity? I received Wordsmith’s email as I was finishing The Pen & the Stethoscope. Published in 2010, it’s a 211-page collection of 15 short stories written by 15 doctors – including four Australians. Its nine non-fiction and six fiction stories vary in topic and writing quality – and thus their ability to attract and hold my interest. My picks are those by the three best-known medical writers: Atul Gawande, Peter Goldsworthy and Oliver Sacks. I don’t doubt doctors, at least good ones, are skillful observers of humans. But I don’t know if, as Williams suggests, doctors’ vocational skills give them the front-running in the writing stakes. For it’s one thing to collect material to write about, and quite another to craft it into beautiful writing. For all this, on balance I’m pleased I read The Pen & the Stethoscope.

Exploded by a photobomb

Earlier this month an IT expert told me that when you buy a computer, it’s outdated before you even unbox it. Analogously I can’t tell you what the world’s population is – because as this population clock graphically shows [1], in the time it’d take me to say or write the number, it’d have increased. We live on a crowded planet all right. And it seems that in so-called developed countries, and increasingly in the others too, digital camera use is increasing. The twin effects of more people and more cameras means that ever more of the world’s happenings are captured on disc, chip or card. Mostly this capture’s intentional. But sometimes not. Unintentional photography – at least from the photographer’s viewpoint – has a name: photobombing [2]. I didn’t know this term until a few days ago when I read this gizmodo piece [3]. It tells of a bag thief who was apprehended because his act of theft was photographed – unintentionally but serendipitously. And the story’s even more exquisite because the photographer’s the owner of the stolen bag. Sometimes synchronicity’s a curse – say when your car stalls on a railway crossing with a train approaching. Though sometimes it’s a blessing – as in this case. The growing world population’s a harbinger of ecological disaster. But until then, some good’s coming from more people taking more photographs. Ho hum.

farmdoc's blog post number 676

In my life (so far) of over 62½ years, I’ve witnessed many unforeseeable changes. Today’s post’s about one of them. Last Monday I wrote of our Canadian friends Mark and Maya who recently visited us along with their (pictured) children Marina (aka my sous-chef) and Mateus (aka Pug, and The Boy Wonder). I’ve known for some time that the children’s surname is their mother’s maiden name. I’d never come across this before. When they were here in Mole Creek, I forgot to ask Mark and Maya why they’d done this. Two days ago I discussed it with Sweetheart Vivienne. Then, lo and behold, in yesterday’s Age Catherine Deveny wrote this article about precisely this topic. Talk about synchronicity. When I was a lad, all children were assigned their father’s surname. Routinely. No ifs or buts. I assume this ritual continued until recently. For example my granddaughters, born between 2000 and 2007, all have their father’s surname (albeit their mother’s maiden name as their middle name). I just don’t know how I’d feel if any of my daughters’ children had their mothers’ maiden name (i.e. my surname) as theirs. In one way it’d be nice because as the father of daughters my surname wouldn’t otherwise make it to the next generation. But a child’s surname being its mother’s maiden name’s still strange to me – even though Ms Deveny’s article helped explain the rationale. Again I feel like a sheep man in cattle country. Ho hum.