jjablkowski's blog

Recently I had lunch with two retired physician friends and during our chit chat about past and present medical practices, we touched on the rise of telephone consultations. Calling a doctor on the phone is nothing new. In my time in general medical practice in the 1950s to the late 1960s, patients usually called me directly at my home after office hours or left messages with my dedicated telephone answering service. Most of those calls were short, reporting some acute symptomology, or even an emergency, like a fall.

Well before my wife died from a 9-year-long progressive deep dementia, she signed up to have her lifeless body donated to the Department of Anatomy at UBC. I believe her body was used for teaching and research. After 1½ years, in accordance with the donation agreement, her remains were cremated and returned to me. I must admit to the pang in my heart when I opened the simple urn containing her cremated ashes. We were married for close to 70 years. Now her body was reduced to a bag of ashes. Once I got over my difficult feelings, I became glad on her behalf that her wish had been fulfilled.

During ongoing nationwide protests in Iran, many Iranians wounded by security forces are facing a heart-wrenching situation: avoiding treatment in increasingly unsafe hospitals for fear of being detained, tortured, prosecuted, or even killed. In this perilous environment, brave medics like Dr Ayda Rostami stepped forward to provide care to the injured, despite the grave risks they face.

My interest in the development of relevant medical educational and health care programs for LGBTQIA2S+ people was sparked after reading The New Life by Tom Crewe, a student of 19-century British history. Although the story is presented as historical fiction, it is based on the efforts of Dr Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), a pioneer medical sexologist, and his associates in the late 1800s.

The observance of a Father’s Day in the US, and subsequently in Canada as of the 1920s, started because of tragic events. One woman’s memory of a mine explosion in West Virginia in the early 1900s, which left over 250 widows and more than 1000 children fatherless, and another woman’s memory of her father, an American Civil War veteran who kept his family together after his wife died of childbirth, led to years of concerted efforts to commemorate fathers.