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Lifeline
DISSECTING ROOM
LIFELINE Abdallah S Daar After graduating from medical school in London, Abdallah S Daar spent about 10 years training, researching, and teaching in Oxford. He went to the Middle East to help start two medical schools and took up the chair of surgery in Oman in 1988. Organ transplantation led him to ethics, and subsequent work with WHO and the Human Genome Organization. He was elected Hunterian Professor of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1999. Who was your most influential teacher, and why? Sir Peter Morris in Oxford taught me to care for my trainees, to look beyond the obvious, and to see surgery as a branch of biology. What would be your advice to a newly qualified doctor? Treat your patients as you would like to be treated yourself. How do you relax? By occasionally playing a certain game of applied risk management, which quickly differentiates recklessness from daring application of skills and knowledge—poker is a lousy name for this intellectual pursuit. What apart from your wife is the passion of your life? Exploring the elusive connections between different cultures and domains of knowledge—a possible byproduct of having grown up in four different cultures. E O Wilson does this wonderfully in his latest book called Consilience. What are you currently reading? Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost reminds you what a devastating life-companion history can be. What is your worst habit? Making an obsession out of the desire to make every moment count. What part of your work gives you the most pleasure? Coming up with innovative solutions missed by others, and occasionally having them accepted by my colleagues. Do you believe in monogamy? When monogamy was invented, life expectancy was very much shorter than now! Seriously, it is the best option if your marriage, like mine, is full of love and is perpetually refreshed and reinvented. Otherwise, it is better to part before you die alive.
1618
Coffee mug thoughts “
o waste your time is to waste your life”, says one side of my coffee mug. “To master your time is to master your life.” I sip from it for a moment, not fooled by its selfimportance: my mug may think it is there to preach, I know it exists to hold coffee. The other side holds sensible advice. “List goals! Set priorities!” clamours the mug. Sensible undeniably, but sound? Strike the phrase like a tuning fork against your mind’s forehead and it has a rather hollow tinny ring—its true bleating character begins to appear. “Make a daily to do list.” Is there no luxuriousness in waking in the grey of the morning to find the day stretching out, unconfined, full of possibilities and of adventure? “That won’t help you get published”, says the voice in your head of that smug colleague you have never really liked, the one given to preaching and pompousness. “What is the best use of my time right now?” says the mug. If it is a spring morning, I would strongly suggest it might well be staring out of the window for a moment. Do you choose to review again the human leucocyte antigen associations of an obscure vasculitis in place of noticing that, my God, the daffodils are up and the buds on the horse chestnut have a sticky gleam to them? “Handle each piece of paper only once.” Paper, presumably, that contains thoughts writ down as words. Should we also handle thoughts once only? Are we to believe the human mind is something of a franking machine, best operated by stamping each envelope of facts a single time and passing on? Thoughts should be turned over and over, irresistible smooth stones in a mind’s hands, and if there is anything worth reading on pages than they deserve the same treatment. “Do it now!” ends the list. The rallying cry of the ever-practical, that lost band who
T
hurry past beauty with a shuffling step and a bowed head. I stole the mug, I admit, from the hospital canteen. It was not that it offended me to see it there—although it did—but that in situ the writing on the mug was dull, insipid, insidiously platitudinous. But context is everything. On my desk, half hidden amidst piles of ill-arranged papers, shaded over by the hyacinths I periodically forget to water, crowded on the one hand by unread journals, on another by a book of poems, the mug becomes an ironic gem. By one small act of theft I have attached humour and life where they otherwise held poor purchase. Whether medicine is an art or a science has been written about at length. To me it seems a craft analogous to gardening. The appropriate application of evidence requires perceptive observance: which, since that is the basis of all imagination, gives a burnish of artistry. Medicine and gardening are honourable attempts at encouraging the fulsome growth of life. Not of themselves wholly imaginative, they can nevertheless stimulate imagination in their practitioners. Unprejudiced receptive attention to each hour is the key. Perhaps today it will lead us to an insight in molecular biology, or to the satisfying feeling of one’s work being worthwhile. Whatever the results, they cannot be planned for. “My imagination is my Monastery”, wrote Keats, “and I am its Monk”. Towards the end of his life he intended to go back to medicine so as to serve the world while his poetic faculties were in abeyance, and in hope of replenishing them. “List goals”, commands the mug. “Set priorities.” If one aspires to the lifelessness of a coffee mug, a dumb receptacle for whatever is poured one’s way, it is a fine ethos. Druin Burch
THE LANCET • Vol 356 • November 4, 2000
For personal use only. Not to be reproduced without permission of The Lancet.
LIFELINE Abdallah S Daar After graduating from medical school in London, Abdallah S Daar spent about 10 years training, researching, and teaching in Oxford. He went to the Middle East to help start two medical schools and took up the chair of surgery in Oman in 1988. Organ transplantation led him to ethics, and subsequent work with WHO and the Human Genome Organization. He was elected Hunterian Professor of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1999. Who was your most influential teacher, and why? Sir Peter Morris in Oxford taught me to care for my trainees, to look beyond the obvious, and to see surgery as a branch of biology. What would be your advice to a newly qualified doctor? Treat your patients as you would like to be treated yourself. How do you relax? By occasionally playing a certain game of applied risk management, which quickly differentiates recklessness from daring application of skills and knowledge—poker is a lousy name for this intellectual pursuit. What apart from your wife is the passion of your life? Exploring the elusive connections between different cultures and domains of knowledge—a possible byproduct of having grown up in four different cultures. E O Wilson does this wonderfully in his latest book called Consilience. What are you currently reading? Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost reminds you what a devastating life-companion history can be. What is your worst habit? Making an obsession out of the desire to make every moment count. What part of your work gives you the most pleasure? Coming up with innovative solutions missed by others, and occasionally having them accepted by my colleagues. Do you believe in monogamy? When monogamy was invented, life expectancy was very much shorter than now! Seriously, it is the best option if your marriage, like mine, is full of love and is perpetually refreshed and reinvented. Otherwise, it is better to part before you die alive.
1618
Coffee mug thoughts “
o waste your time is to waste your life”, says one side of my coffee mug. “To master your time is to master your life.” I sip from it for a moment, not fooled by its selfimportance: my mug may think it is there to preach, I know it exists to hold coffee. The other side holds sensible advice. “List goals! Set priorities!” clamours the mug. Sensible undeniably, but sound? Strike the phrase like a tuning fork against your mind’s forehead and it has a rather hollow tinny ring—its true bleating character begins to appear. “Make a daily to do list.” Is there no luxuriousness in waking in the grey of the morning to find the day stretching out, unconfined, full of possibilities and of adventure? “That won’t help you get published”, says the voice in your head of that smug colleague you have never really liked, the one given to preaching and pompousness. “What is the best use of my time right now?” says the mug. If it is a spring morning, I would strongly suggest it might well be staring out of the window for a moment. Do you choose to review again the human leucocyte antigen associations of an obscure vasculitis in place of noticing that, my God, the daffodils are up and the buds on the horse chestnut have a sticky gleam to them? “Handle each piece of paper only once.” Paper, presumably, that contains thoughts writ down as words. Should we also handle thoughts once only? Are we to believe the human mind is something of a franking machine, best operated by stamping each envelope of facts a single time and passing on? Thoughts should be turned over and over, irresistible smooth stones in a mind’s hands, and if there is anything worth reading on pages than they deserve the same treatment. “Do it now!” ends the list. The rallying cry of the ever-practical, that lost band who
T
hurry past beauty with a shuffling step and a bowed head. I stole the mug, I admit, from the hospital canteen. It was not that it offended me to see it there—although it did—but that in situ the writing on the mug was dull, insipid, insidiously platitudinous. But context is everything. On my desk, half hidden amidst piles of ill-arranged papers, shaded over by the hyacinths I periodically forget to water, crowded on the one hand by unread journals, on another by a book of poems, the mug becomes an ironic gem. By one small act of theft I have attached humour and life where they otherwise held poor purchase. Whether medicine is an art or a science has been written about at length. To me it seems a craft analogous to gardening. The appropriate application of evidence requires perceptive observance: which, since that is the basis of all imagination, gives a burnish of artistry. Medicine and gardening are honourable attempts at encouraging the fulsome growth of life. Not of themselves wholly imaginative, they can nevertheless stimulate imagination in their practitioners. Unprejudiced receptive attention to each hour is the key. Perhaps today it will lead us to an insight in molecular biology, or to the satisfying feeling of one’s work being worthwhile. Whatever the results, they cannot be planned for. “My imagination is my Monastery”, wrote Keats, “and I am its Monk”. Towards the end of his life he intended to go back to medicine so as to serve the world while his poetic faculties were in abeyance, and in hope of replenishing them. “List goals”, commands the mug. “Set priorities.” If one aspires to the lifelessness of a coffee mug, a dumb receptacle for whatever is poured one’s way, it is a fine ethos. Druin Burch
THE LANCET • Vol 356 • November 4, 2000
For personal use only. Not to be reproduced without permission of The Lancet.