Biography as Prophecy: Direction for Maternal and Child Health

Excerpt

Biographies such as the one Wallis and Guyer published in this issue of the Journal serve to remind us that greatness germinates within the creative mind of the individual, the dynamic seeds of the person's psychological environment and the contextual garden of his or her sociopolitical milieu. While we may surmise the intellectual craft of Dr. Myron Wegman's gene pool, or, likewise, the inspirational tension of his early family relationships, Wallis and Guyer (1) lead us clearly through a portrait of the times that shaped Dr. Wegman's conscientious analysis and thesis of the interaction between biology and society that determined the health of children during much of the last century. Following Newton's ultimately imperfect gospel, centuries of scientists assumed that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts rather than the relationship of its parts, and therefore believed that fixing a damaged structure while ignoring a dysfunctional relationship could repair the whole organism. Today, quantum physicists explode the tenets of classical science and no longer accept that atoms are composed exclusively of physical matter, or that for every action there is but one equal and opposite reaction, or even that energy is finite. Wegman challenged parallel principles that constrained the practice of public health. He questioned core doctrines which advised that responsibility and authority have finite boundaries, that conditions rather than individuals respond to treatments and therefore that the treatment effect can be predicted, and that health is derived from the elimination of disease. Perspicacious thinkers like Wegman (2), and his more theoretically inclined contemporaries Heisenberg (3, 4), Bohr (5) and Einstein (6), demonstrated the power of humble, local, flexible and interdependent forces to influence seismic, distant and, at times, global transformations. Such occurrences operate often beyond the visible or knowable plane of existence (at least beyond the explanatory scope of our current empirical disciplines) yet hold the capacity for surprise and the strength to transform our lives. We need only recall the singular image of Henry Ford's motor car to stir us out of our habitual conceptual skin. Who would have imagined that a horseless carriage would help reduce childhood mortality from infectious disease? Or that vital statistics can guide us to important concerns that can be solved only by witnessing the patient's lived experience? Or, indeed, that diseased relationships, far more than illness, can alter the migration and organization of neural connections during early childhood, increasing susceptibility to metabolic, infectious, and cardiovascular morbidities later in life (7‐10)? …