How I Learned to Understand the World by Hans Rosling

Author:Hans Rosling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

* * *

Readjusting was a quick process, and the children made a real effort at it. We bought them satchels for school. Everyone got an appointment with the dentist. Agneta returned to her job at the maternity unit and I to mine in the medical wards. We really were very shocked to see how different everything was in Sweden. We had new winter tires fitted on our shabby little blue car and we booked a slot with a photographer for Christmas card photos. We immersed ourselves back into Swedish family life.

But after a while, leftover tasks from Mozambique began to pop up in our thoughts. Agneta had promised to edit a booklet with instructions for maternal healthcare and family planning. The text was ready and we had it printed and shipped to Maputo.

I had received a letter from Maputo telling me that so far, no analyses had been made on the samples I had left in Geneva. My friend and colleague Anders Molin, who was also back in Sweden, said he was worried that the paralysis epidemic would strike again in the next dry season. It had been easy to adjust to life at home but it also proved impossible for me to forget the experiences from Nacala and the responsibilities I still bore.

Was the form of paralysis I had observed truly a condition new to medical science?

One morning in spring 1982 I was given a push to carry on with this line of research: a seriously mobility-impaired patient came to see me at my clinic in Hudiksvall. Her entrance into my office stunned me so completely I forgot to greet her: she walked with crutches, her knees turning inward and her wrists twitching at every step. It was exactly the same spastic pattern that I had been investigating a few months earlier in Mozambique. She told me that it was an inherited disease. She had been an adult when the first signs appeared and her difficulties had grown worse with time. She wanted to know if there was a way of stopping further deterioration. She had been seen by a specialist a few years earlier but had been offered no treatment.

“Has there been any new research that could help me?” she asked.

After examining her, I promised that I would search for a way of halting the progress of her condition but that it would take a couple of weeks. I would contact her and arrange another appointment.

Later that day, I knocked on the head consultant’s door eager to talk to him. Pontus Wiklund knew his town very well and would be able to identify the family with this heritable health problem. He listened and looked curious.

“You see,” I said, “it looks precisely like the nervous deficit we saw in the paralysis cases I investigated in Mozambique. If it’s inherited, I must read all the literature there is. Any more information would help us arrive at a better understanding of the underlying cause.”

My wise boss smiled and said he had always thought I would end up in research.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.