Old book gives our lives perspective - From the cluttered desk with Keith Roulston

Casting over our bookshelves for something to read, I came upon a 50-year-old book written by the family doctor of my childhood, Dr. William Victor Johnston, a former president of the Ontario Medical Association and first head (for 11 years) of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. What a change the world has made since the West Wawanosh native first began to practise family medicine in Lucknow a century ago.

 

The world we live in seems infinitely better than even the one of my childhood, let alone the world of the 1920s and 1930s when Dr. Johnston began to practise medicine. And yet, despite our improvements, we still face medical problems our doctors can’t solve, like the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

And the disruption to our comfortable world upsets people. The Liberal candidate in a “safe” Toronto seat was defeated in a close race recently. That’s caused huge dissatisfaction with Canada’s Liberal government, already well back in the polls, and calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign.

 

South of the border, President Joe Biden embarrassed himself in last week’s debate with Republican candidate Donald Trump in this November’s presidential election, leading many people to call on him to resign. Trump, meanwhile, told dozens of lies, but it’s just accepted that he will do that and so all the pressure was on Biden.

 

Meanwhile, five of the leaders of the Group of Seven countries face elections and polls show all of them are likely to lose. Gaining strength are right wing parties (1930s anyone?).

 

Such is the dissatisfaction of the post-pandemic world. And yet reading this old book gave me an opportunity to 
observe just how much we’ve gained.

 

Let’s remember that we didn’t have medicare until Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson introduced it on a national level (Saskatchewan had it previously) in the mid-1960s, slightly before this book was written. As a child in those days before medicare, I caught rheumatic fever. We couldn’t afford the cost of a hospital stay, so my mother nursed me at home on the farm, and the doctor (Dr. Johnston’s successor) walked up our snow-blocked lane (it was before snowblowers became common) to regularly treat me.

 

You haven’t heard of rheumatic fever? It was one of the diseases of that era which virtually disappeared with the use of antibiotics in the 1950s and 1960s. Long-term, I was affected by a weakened heart valve that wasn’t discovered until a few years ago and I had to have a heart valve replacement in 2019, something that wouldn’t have been possible until relatively recent times.

 

Dr. Johnston mentions Lorne Reid in his book. I remember Mr. Reid who sharpened my skates and fixed shoes in the back of the local shoe store when I was young. He did it from his wheelchair, necessary because he was left paralyzed from the waist down by polio when he was a teen. He was a cheerful man who made the best of his situation.

 

In his book, Dr. Johnston gave the number of cases of polio in Ontario each year from 1920 to 1969 with infections peaking at 2,109 in 1953 and fading to zero by 1963 after a vaccine was discovered and free vaccinations were offered to rid our country of this disease.

 

Likewise, tuberculosis was a frightening disease of that era that has disappeared in our country in recent years. I remember my uncle had a lung problem and was sent for treatment at one of the special hospitals that had been set up to treat people struggling with the breathing problems caused by tuberculosis. Again, modern drugs made the disease virtually disappear in Canada.

 

One challenge to modern doctors is that international travel has boomed in the last few decades and disease is much more portable. COVID-19 spread quickly from China to the rest of the world because of travel. 

 

Yet, we keep travelling. One of the modern “crises” on the holiday weekend was that thousands of people, who had plans to travel, couldn’t because of a strike by WestJet mechanics, a strike solved Monday. Strikes are a regular issue these days because inflation has boomed in the post-pandemic world. 

 

Inflation? This is nothing compared to the 20-plus per cent rate when we bought our house in 1975.

 

Another big concern is that of a lack of housing.  This is partly caused by the federal government letting a half-million people immigrate to Canada to fill the needs of employers. You think we’ve got problems? More people immigrate to Canada than anywhere else in the world.

 

Reading this old book gives perspective on our modern lives. We are more blessed than we have ever been. We need to stop complaining for a moment and appreciate that.