Mind That Child by Simon Rowley

Author:Simon Rowley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143771999
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

When I was about eight some townie friends of my parents came to the farm for lunch, bringing their daughter Susan and, much more interestingly, Susan’s new toy, a doll called Flubber. The doll’s selling point was that he was indestructible. Made of sponge rubber and metal, he could be bent and folded and withstand any insult. I was fascinated, and persuaded Susan that we should take Flubber to the woodshed and put his indestructibility to the test with an axe.

The first swing bounced off the foam rubber, but at the second blow the blade snapped through the wire internal frame and chopped Flubber completely in half. Shocked, we guiltily hid Flubber’s remains under the back seat of her parents’ car, and lied through our teeth when it was time for them to leave and Flubber couldn’t be found.

Though my ethical standards have improved since then, I like to think that the day I investigated Flubber’s innards represents a milestone in my lifelong curiosity about how the body works, and a determination to figure out what makes things tick.

It was this kind of curiosity that drove me to plough through a rather dry book called Mechanics of the Motor Vehicle when I was 13. I wasn’t especially good at maths or science, but I really wanted to know how cars worked, so I read and reread it until I understood the principles of getting petrol to ignite, produce energy, push a piston up and down to produce rotation, then using the camshaft to convert the axis of rotation and make the wheels spin.

The same curiosity would later inspire bursts of enthusiasm where I’d read for hours until I knew, say, the rudiments of the stars and planets, or the names of all the New Zealand native trees and shrubs. In my mid teens, my fixations broadened to include poetry. I suspect that my father, as well as his farmworkers, were slightly baffled that I spent my smoko breaks during haymaking reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost.

I believe that the art of medical diagnosis is built on that kind of curiosity. When training young practitioners now, I tell them diagnosis must always include not only the question ‘what’ but also the question ‘why’. A ‘why’ will guide you towards asking the right questions and developing a more complete understanding of a condition. What’s more, when you ask ‘why’ you create an opportunity to prevent something happening again.

It was asking ‘why’ that led to Jane Harding’s identification of the dangers of chest physiotherapy on premature babies. And it was asking ‘why’ that led a pair of Auckland researchers to solve the mystery of an epidemic of stillbirths among Pasifika babies.

In the mid-1980s, Auckland hospitals started seeing extraordinarily high rates of stillbirth among babies born to mothers who were immigrants from the Pacific Islands. Many were full-term babies of a good size who had died or were left with major permanent brain damage, due to inexplicable brain bleeds. I saw a number of these babies immediately after birth, and their injuries were shocking.

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