North American Kaleidoscope

Abstract

I have called these brief remarks a kaleidoscope because inevitably the impressions left after a brief three months spent travelling, visiting and lecturing from New York to San Francisco and from Vancouver to Boston are those of an ever changing, ever fascinating pattern of personalities and scenery, hospitals and research institutions. I can but discuss a few aspects of general rather than of particular interest.

Undoubtedly, for those of us fortunate enough to have been allowed to travel thus widely, the impact of the different environment is such that, in retrospect, much of it seems unreal. The American culture, the whole fascinating mechanism of living, is so indescribably different from anything that we have at home, that to experience it for even a few months is to broaden one’s outlook and widen one’s own horizon to an extent which previously one would have thought unnecessary. It is in the very nature of us all that we have a self-conceit that we are already broadminded, well travelled and appreciative of other cultures than our own. Nobody’s medical or social education is complete until he has at least sampled American and Canadian life, and a generalisation such as this is not as platitudinous as it sounds.