Steeped in Blood Read Online Free PDF

goodbye to a friend at varsity and, while looking for him, I bumped into a senior medical student, Beau Loots, who asked me why I was looking so down. I told him. He sat me down for an hour and, rather like Dick Whittington, turned me around. I decided not to leave and found a different flat. I have maintained a friendship with Beau ever since.
    My mother, who was still extremely unwell, contacted a friend, who removed her from the sanatorium and had her admitted to Johannesburg General Hospital. Her heart condition and the lung infection were diagnosed and she was placed on appropriate medication. She then developed a persistent cough, and by June or July that year was diagnosed with bronchial carcinoma. Her health deteriorated quickly, and she died in September 1967.
    My interest had always been in research and, in particular, cancer research. My mother’s death was a powerful impetus to extend this interest, and my former English teacher, Dr Gevers, also encouraged me to go into research as a career. Gevers wrote a letter to me that had a huge influence on my career, and revealed much about Gevers, the man and the scholar. In this letter, which I still have to this day, he wrote:
    By now you will have gone to Johannesburg to register as a medical student. I wish you much luck in your endeavours. Some hold that the first year is the most difficult; others believe it’s the third. In general, no doubt, it must be the first, but in your case there should be no trouble at all, seeing thatyou have been a very independent student for some time. If you have not done any shorthand, you should begin to develop a system of your own to keep up with the lecturers. It is believed that very often the top third of a medical group, after having obtained their degrees (M.B., B.Ch.), become research men and/or Biologists, Biophysicists, Biochemists. The middle group develop into specialists, and the lowest third into medical practitioners. As you are an idealist, I take it you may become a research man.
    One of the reasons I had wanted to study medicine was that I thought it would allow me to carry out research. Soon, however, I realised that medicine was not the right road to research.
    Medicine is a strange set of learnings. The workings of the human body are very complex, and are based on an intimate understanding of the body’s biochemistry. Its delicate balance is affected by any invasive activity, including an operation, a healing wound or medication, which affects the biochemical reactions in the body. Even something as simple as an X-ray has an impact. There is no branch of medicine that does not have an underlying biochemical basis.
    Ordinary chemistry is the chemistry of elements, chemical compounds and substances, such as salts. It is about the energy needed to bond chemicals to create other compounds. Biochemistry, on the other hand, is the chemistry of living things – the study of the molecules of life – and deals with the reactions of the body to external events. A person’s skin goes brown in the sun, for example, because the chemical changes that the skin undergoes are a biochemical reaction of the body to the sun’s rays, producing the brown pigment, melanin. Biochemistry controls all aspects of our body, from our breathing to our heartbeat – the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, is a biochemical wonder. If a person is diseased, there is something wrong with his or her biochemistry.
    I wanted to understand the biochemical pathways deep withinthe cells, and I realised that medicine would give me just a smattering of the knowledge I craved. Medicine would teach me how to follow a recipe, how to cut along a dotted line. I wanted to design the recipe, to establish where to place that dotted line. I needed to grasp the fundamentals; I needed an intimate understanding of chemistry.
    I went to see the dean of medicine at the end of the first year, and switched from medicine to second-year chemistry and