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David Weatherall
DISSECTING ROOM
LIFELINE David Weatherall After qualifying in Liverpool, National Service in Southeast Asia and 4 years at Johns Hopkins Hospital, David Weatherall returned to Liverpool as Professor of haematology. Later he moved to Oxford, first as Nuffield Professor of clinical medicine and then as Regius Professor of medicine. In his spare time he directs the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit and the Institute of Molecular Medicine. Who were your most influential teachers? The physiologist Rod Gregory who showed how a creative scientist can bring his subject to life, and the clinician Cyril Clarke who taught me to be curious, and not just about people’s genes. How do you relax? At all-night sittings listening to music or playing it very badly on a longsuffering spinnet, and sleeping during the day on committees. What is your greatest regret? The hours spent on committees rather than with my patients and research team. What complementary therapies have you tried? While a house physician I injured my wrists in a sporting accident and was offered a copper bracelet by a sympathetic patient. I wore it on one wrist and noted that the untreated wrist recovered more quickly. Complementary medicine needs more carefully designed clinical trials of this type. How would you like to die? Like my father, quickly and listening to music. What is your favourite film/play? Both on stage and screen, in “The Madness of George III”, Alan Bennett caught the monumental pomposity of doctors; we should all be forced to see the play at least twice a year. What is your worst habit? Setting fire to my clothes with my pipe; the recent incineration of my dinner jacket at Glyndebourne has given new meaning to the term “black tie”.
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Lumsden shall not die o be absolutely honest, irrespective of the number of papers one has published, the sight of one’s name in print always brings on a warm glow—unless, of course, it is splashed across the front page of the tabloids accompanied by a headline such as “My Secret Shame”. I first managed it (into print that is, not the tabloids) as a contributor to our school magazine over 30 years ago, and the taste for self-publicity has been with me since. However, it is not only the ego that is affected. I am sure that each of us who has ever had anything published, from seminal work on postmodernism to a humble letter to The Lancet, secretly believes they have suddenly become qualified literary critics able to spot bad writing at a hundred yards. As far as novels go, I don’t think you even have to read them right through; looking at the names of the characters is sufficient. For example, take “good” writers like, say, Graham Greene, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, or even Ian Fleming. They all have one thing in common: characters with simple, believable names such as Scobey, Bennett, and Bond. OK, so Humbert is a bit naff and so is Pnin, but Lolita is good. Indeed, you often actually meet people at parties and at work with names like these. “Bad” writers, on the other hand, have characters called Lucky San Francisco, Vince Huddersfield, Lawrence O’Marques, or Gossamer Thread. Ask yourself the last time you met people with names like these at the supermarket checkout. Not that “bad” should be confused with “unsuccessful”: some of the worst offenders make the most money. Just dip into the stuff that fills the shelves of your local bookshop or airport departure lounge. But then I am probably just jealous because I never have had the time to transform the contents of those two exercise-books of
T
mine in the back of the filing cabinet into the bestsellers they would undoubtedly be. To be fair, I have actually met some folk with unusual names. Angel del Blas is a good example. You can just imagine a raven-haired beauty from South America, can’t you? Well he was actually a distinguished scientist from Boston. And I was once at a meeting where Dr Fuxe (correctly pronounced Fewkes?) gave a presentation and, like the other speakers, he had his name on a card on the table in front of him. Perhaps the chairman was short-sighted, but he kept referring to the man in a fashion that I would not dream of repeating here. And I seemed to be the only one who noticed. I have always fancied myself as a born creator of names, and one of my prototype novels has a villain that would not shame a Batman comic, “Deu Sex Machina”. I have also created a series of good guys and dolls with names that generally have an anatomical or moral ring—eg, Trigerminal Winslow or Foster Chastity. Over the years I have become a “collector” of names, and they can crop up in the most extraordinary places. If you are an insomniac and watch the old black-and-white British movies that seem to be shown on television in the early hours, you will sometimes see the wonderfully evocative name “Lumsden Hare” as the credits roll by. I do not know anything about dear old Lumsden, although he sounds as if he might have been the inspiration for the Peter Sellers character, the actor (emphasis on the second syllable dear boy) who went round trying to get someone to cash his rubber cheque. I think a name like that deserves to live forever so you’ll be in my book, Lumsden, if ever it gets written.
David Jack
THE LANCET • Vol 352 • September 5, 1998
LIFELINE David Weatherall After qualifying in Liverpool, National Service in Southeast Asia and 4 years at Johns Hopkins Hospital, David Weatherall returned to Liverpool as Professor of haematology. Later he moved to Oxford, first as Nuffield Professor of clinical medicine and then as Regius Professor of medicine. In his spare time he directs the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit and the Institute of Molecular Medicine. Who were your most influential teachers? The physiologist Rod Gregory who showed how a creative scientist can bring his subject to life, and the clinician Cyril Clarke who taught me to be curious, and not just about people’s genes. How do you relax? At all-night sittings listening to music or playing it very badly on a longsuffering spinnet, and sleeping during the day on committees. What is your greatest regret? The hours spent on committees rather than with my patients and research team. What complementary therapies have you tried? While a house physician I injured my wrists in a sporting accident and was offered a copper bracelet by a sympathetic patient. I wore it on one wrist and noted that the untreated wrist recovered more quickly. Complementary medicine needs more carefully designed clinical trials of this type. How would you like to die? Like my father, quickly and listening to music. What is your favourite film/play? Both on stage and screen, in “The Madness of George III”, Alan Bennett caught the monumental pomposity of doctors; we should all be forced to see the play at least twice a year. What is your worst habit? Setting fire to my clothes with my pipe; the recent incineration of my dinner jacket at Glyndebourne has given new meaning to the term “black tie”.
830
Lumsden shall not die o be absolutely honest, irrespective of the number of papers one has published, the sight of one’s name in print always brings on a warm glow—unless, of course, it is splashed across the front page of the tabloids accompanied by a headline such as “My Secret Shame”. I first managed it (into print that is, not the tabloids) as a contributor to our school magazine over 30 years ago, and the taste for self-publicity has been with me since. However, it is not only the ego that is affected. I am sure that each of us who has ever had anything published, from seminal work on postmodernism to a humble letter to The Lancet, secretly believes they have suddenly become qualified literary critics able to spot bad writing at a hundred yards. As far as novels go, I don’t think you even have to read them right through; looking at the names of the characters is sufficient. For example, take “good” writers like, say, Graham Greene, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, or even Ian Fleming. They all have one thing in common: characters with simple, believable names such as Scobey, Bennett, and Bond. OK, so Humbert is a bit naff and so is Pnin, but Lolita is good. Indeed, you often actually meet people at parties and at work with names like these. “Bad” writers, on the other hand, have characters called Lucky San Francisco, Vince Huddersfield, Lawrence O’Marques, or Gossamer Thread. Ask yourself the last time you met people with names like these at the supermarket checkout. Not that “bad” should be confused with “unsuccessful”: some of the worst offenders make the most money. Just dip into the stuff that fills the shelves of your local bookshop or airport departure lounge. But then I am probably just jealous because I never have had the time to transform the contents of those two exercise-books of
T
mine in the back of the filing cabinet into the bestsellers they would undoubtedly be. To be fair, I have actually met some folk with unusual names. Angel del Blas is a good example. You can just imagine a raven-haired beauty from South America, can’t you? Well he was actually a distinguished scientist from Boston. And I was once at a meeting where Dr Fuxe (correctly pronounced Fewkes?) gave a presentation and, like the other speakers, he had his name on a card on the table in front of him. Perhaps the chairman was short-sighted, but he kept referring to the man in a fashion that I would not dream of repeating here. And I seemed to be the only one who noticed. I have always fancied myself as a born creator of names, and one of my prototype novels has a villain that would not shame a Batman comic, “Deu Sex Machina”. I have also created a series of good guys and dolls with names that generally have an anatomical or moral ring—eg, Trigerminal Winslow or Foster Chastity. Over the years I have become a “collector” of names, and they can crop up in the most extraordinary places. If you are an insomniac and watch the old black-and-white British movies that seem to be shown on television in the early hours, you will sometimes see the wonderfully evocative name “Lumsden Hare” as the credits roll by. I do not know anything about dear old Lumsden, although he sounds as if he might have been the inspiration for the Peter Sellers character, the actor (emphasis on the second syllable dear boy) who went round trying to get someone to cash his rubber cheque. I think a name like that deserves to live forever so you’ll be in my book, Lumsden, if ever it gets written.
David Jack
THE LANCET • Vol 352 • September 5, 1998