Editorial |
Why I became an occupational physician ...
e-mail: parents{at}aslovak.freeserve.co.uk
On June 27 1948, I arrived at Dover on M.V. King Albert, aged 2
, an asylum-seeking alien ahead of my parents yet to smuggle themselves out of Czechoslovakia. It was a rude shock for them to arrive with nothing in austere post-war England. Unable to teach without UK qualifications, my father took jobs that the indigenous population would not and became a foreman in a Hammersmith cement works lugging 2 cwt cement bags. I did my first industrial visit with him aged 3
and was struck vividly by the dust which coated everything and the sheer grinding physical effort involved. After a couple of years, he got a job as an industrial chemist (his original degree) in a small family firm making cleaning chemicals and stayed there for the rest of his life.
By the age of seven, I had become a holiday laboratory assistant and chemical process worker. It was unpaid except in stale rye buns with thick wedges of elderly salami from the local Polish deli. I learnt to pour concentrated acids and alkalis safely, mouth pipetting and the keeping of careful experimental records. On the factory shop floor, we had a chemical shed, a bottling plant and the offices, three separate and distinct worlds.
As I progressed through A levels, my father changed my career ambitions which had been vaguely focussed on academic science. He announced that I was ‘too stupid to be a scientist and so I would have to be a doctor’. This sounds painfully blunt in English but quite straightforward in Slovakian and nicely illustrates the lack of nuance available in more basic Slavonic languages. I was a very bad medical student, sullen, flippant, argumentative, ungracious and lazy. At qualification, the bloody-mindedness turned in on itself and I determined to learn as much as I could in each job and frequent locums in more exotic specialties to ‘try something different’. However, the lure of chemistry, the smells, the myriad processes and their unseen dangers remained: very much a first love. Thus, a small ad at the back of the BMJ belatedly applied for deposited me in the summer of 1973 as ‘assistant works medical officer’ at ICI Huddersfield, a sprawling square mile of chemical sheds employing 5000 men (plus three women process workers left over from World War 2).
My senior Medical Officer was Bill Taylor who handed me all the process documentation and all the toxicology books then extant (four) on my first day and told me to make my conclusions when I was ready. On the fourth day, I went back and said, ‘There seem to be a lot of gaps’. He said ‘Quite right: so off you go and fill them’. My other teachers were Alex Munn and Geoff Shaw from whom I learnt much toxicology and other specialized occupational science. Sadly Geoff Shaw became ill soon after I arrived and I found myself in his place as senior Medical Officer (Toxicology, Temporary, Unpaid). Despite the unplanned entry mechanism, I knew then as I know now that I had found my vocation.
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