BMJ  2004;329:1111 (6 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7474.1111-a

reviews

SOUNDINGS

A passing age

The generation that I think I most respect is dying out. Throughout my career I have listened to the stories of old people who lived through extraordinary times. They were touched by a kind of insouciant nobility of the kind caught only on the edge of reluctant sentences. The man, put ashore from the Hood with appendicitis, still guilty about being an accidental survivor. The code breakers and spies who kept their secrets all their lives merely because they had said they would do so. Their memories are being lost and it is like unique wine being poured down a drain. I feel that, though I cup my hands, their memories flow through my fingers and away.

The stories come rarely. In a distant voice they recall a momentary event, neglected for decades, a moment pivotal and poignant. It is the place given up in the lifeboat, the moment of weakness never forgiven, the sacrifice of another, the serendipity of loss. These stories are the more valuable because they do not come from our own, sometimes irritatingly confessional generation. Rather they are admissions from private people that sometimes the certainties of life shatter.

I feel the same about the experiences of older colleagues. My retired senior partner remembering the November funeral of a young pregnant woman with leukaemia: grey skies over the steep village graveyard—"like something out of Hardy," he comments. And the stories—too legion to remember—some surely touched up for the apocrypha but often laced with an absurdity that ensures their truth. The philanderer, interrupted by death in flagrante with his mistress, carried to his own bed before the coroner was called. These are echoes of a less strident and more forgiving age.

Occasionally I have subsequently read or heard the full story behind the fragment glimpsed years ago during a consultation. And now that story, those memories, are part of my life too. It is odd how, in this profession, we pass almost unseen through so many people's lives and memories.

Everywhere in medicine you see these brief, bright moments of other people's lives. But they are transient, like bubbles blown from a children's toy evaporating on the grass. They were our parents' generation. They lived in a world more fragmented and uncertain than most of us can imagine. Soon they will be gone.

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Painswick, Gloucestershire

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