While I am hopeful not to have any harrowing bus rides to share about in this blog, I thought this format will keep friends and family updated. As most of you know, I am in London through March at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for a 3 month Diploma Course in Tropical Medicine. My limited experience on medical volunteer trips showed me how much I didn't know about most of the diseases seen in the tropics and that are common in impoverished areas.
I am lucky to have a friend in the same course - Clay Block is a long time friend and fellow UCSF medical student (yes that was a very long time ago!) His wife Jinny did a tropical medicine course in Peru a few years back and she encouraged us to do one too. We are sharing a "flat" near the school in the Bloomsbury area of London on the campus of the University of London. Clay is a nephrologist at Dartmouth so he got us "visiting faculty" status here and access to the prime real estate in this university neighborhood.
The course is actually very difficult (more for me than for Clay - for those of you who know Clay), and there are 70 other students from many countries. Meeting the woman physician from Ethiopia, or the young malaria researcher from Amsterdam, or the Canadian physician who practices only in remote and poorly served areas around the world, etc - this is a big part of our education about international health. The faculty are world renowned clinicians and researchers - many of whom have defined diseases or found cures, or helped to organize public health systems around the world.
The subjects we had lectures on this week included: the plague, cholera, tetanus, malaria (including microscope labs on the parasites and on identifying mosquitos), meningitis, typhoid, other salmonella infections, epidemiology, melioidosis (look that one up), emerging infections around the world, and probably 10 more things that I have forgotten. We have both decided that we do not want to get any of these diseases (which will probably be our theme for the next 3 months.)
Clay brought a "London walks" book and we resolved to try to do one each weekend while we are here. (Laurel will have to sacrifice study time to do this, but she is willing to do so.) The first weekend was the SoHo walk. We saw this great store - but I had to tear Clay away, as he was seriously looking for an umbrella with a sword in the handle. Really... an umbrella store open since 1830!
We roamed old streets in SoHo that used to house many of the new immigrant populations, but now is an eclectic mix of restaurants, stores and on the south side has theaters and music venues. Here is the site where Dr. John Snow lived. He was the physician who discovered that cholera was spread by contaminated water and proved this by stopping a major London epidemic when he shut down the water pump in this neighborhood.
We walked by the building where William Hazlitt (famous English literary critic) died in 1830. His landlady hid his body behind some furniture so she could show the apartment right away! The area is notable for great musical history with the studio that the Beatles recorded "Hey Jude" - See Trident Studios photo below. We also saw the club where the Rolling Stones first performed as well. Also the whole neighborhood was a "hotbed" for communist ideology with Marx and Engels presenting their ideas at the Red Lion Pub. This would later go on to become the Communist Manifesto.
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