From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You - on co-writing

In writing this book, I didn’t want to come across as a know-it-all because I’m not.  I consider myself an expert in rural family medicine – I’m a jack/jill of all trades and master of some. As a rural family physician which suits me well because it is merely a continuation of being raised on a farm and learning how to fix things, doing more things with less stuff and lots of fudging and improvising.

As I was growing up, I was always encouraged to “look things up” in our tiny behind-the-living room door set of shelves that was our library – it had a very fat short green dictionary that seemed to have almost every word that I looked up, a small encyclopedia set bought from Reader’s Digest on a book a month deal, and several atlases.

For some time I felt that there should be a book that linked the uses and abuses of ionizing radiation; I kept hoping that someone would write it.  It certainly sounded like a good project for Physicians for Global Survival. However, if PGS were going to write it, we needed assistance from someone who could “look things up”. Florian came to the Physicians for Global Survival’s office as part of a Master’s student community placement at a time that I needed help with some research.  He quickly produced material to satisfy the small project that I was working on and together we hatched up the idea of doing a sort of “ionizing radiation for dummies” book.

This became a scholarly thesis as he and I watched the framework evolve.  Florian did not have a scientific background; he was completing his Masters thesis in International Studies. What started as a student placement continued as the work grew. We were able to offer him a better salary than minimum wages at Canadian Tire. Flo fit into the PGS office; he drank tea, rode the bus and joined conversations. The framework of the book is entirely Flo’s with consultation. He was also the perfect skeptic – we didn’t argue but we did have lively discussions about topics or ways to present material that only served to improve the project. Flo was initially engaged as a research assistant but so much of the book was written by him that it is fully coauthored. I think that it is safe to say that he and I learned far more about this topic than we ever expected – in fact, I don’t think that we knew how much information was available about the field of ionizing radiation. We realized that we couldn’t write the “ionizing radiation for dummies” book – at least not before writing a book that explained the topic for ourselves!

What we discovered in our work was that we can not speak of the topic without defining it, its history, its science, how is it measured, what it does, how harmful is it, what can we do with it, its abuses, politics around its use and more.  We found that we were writing a history book, a social studies and political science book and a science and health care text.

Neither Flo nor I could have done this without the other.