Impact factor
This is the first Coda I have written since Christopher Martyn retired last month as editor of QJM. Christopher would no doubt have censored any compliments about himself, so this is my first chance to praise him in these pages. He has been an extraordinarily thoughtful and literate editor, and I want to use this month's article to reflect both on our relationship as columnist and editor, and also more generally on the role of editor as muse.
I first heard from Christopher when he took over QJM in 2001. He said he had read an article that I had written in the BMJ as a medical student about how to write a textbook that students might actually read. He told me he had enjoyed it, and claimed that he had used it as a guide himself when writing a book in the past. He was now looking for someone who could contribute a monthly column of comment, preferably entertaining and erudite, for the new look QJM. Would I be willing to give it a stab for a few months? I was amazed that a piece I had written 26 years previously could lead to such an invitation, and I wasn't sure if I could deliver on the erudition. However, I had managed to contribute a column of ephemeral chatter to one of the medical freebies for many years, so I knew I could meet deadlines and probably keep a few readers awake as well. I said yes.
At first we agreed that Coda should be loosely connected with medicine, but in time I quite how unconcerned Christopher was about the exact degree of looseness. Over the years he has been happy to accept pieces about cheese, dictionaries, sex, Mozart's operas, hitch-hiking, the history of Australia, global warming, travelling in the Peloponnese and much else. Rather than desperately scrabbling around each month for some relevant nuggets of medical wisdom (every columnist's nightmare), I have had his permission to base what I wrote on my everyday reading, or a play I have seen, or simply something that has come into my head. Has any doctor with a taste for dabbling in authorship ever had a more generous offer?
We started to meet regularly in London, usually at the British Museum, over lunch or coffee. I learned about some of Christopher's own interests, including sailing and violin-making, as well as neurology, epidemiology, and his editorial work here and on the BMJ team. Each time I had a chance to ramble or rant about some of my own current preoccupations and to see whether, in his view, they might have the makings of a future article for the back pages of QJM. Christopher is a natural conversationalist, who believes that almost any idea will turn into something interesting and publishable if you throw it around with enough scepticism and sense of fun. As a result, I often came away from meetings with articles pretty much half-formed already in my head. Sometimes he had to spike one when he realized that it wouldn't come out well on the printed page. Far more often, he was supportive but able to point out where I needed to remove a silly metaphor, a glib conclusion, or something ridiculously self-important for a column designed to amuse people for a few minutes. He always did so in the kindest possible way.
Over time I became aware that Christopher was more than an editor. As well as a friend, he has often been the imaginary reader for whom I was writing: the erudition and entertainment he mentioned in his original commission are the qualities that he brought to bear in his own role. I also discovered something I have rarely encountered in editors previously, namely a conviction on his part that he had a right and a responsibility to unlock thoughts that have had not yet been thought, and words that had not yet been articulated.
The Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin—much in fashion these days—argued that all writing, of whatever kind, is dialogical. It requires both a writer and a reader to sustain its existence, along with the innumerable community of past writers and readers who have contributed to make the language what it is, and to provide contexts and meaning for anything that is said. Whether we are writing reports of medical research, epic novels or lightweight journalistic commentary, our texts are never shots in the dark. Rather, they are episodes in an unceasing polyphonic conversation with others who are searching to discover, and to create, meaning. It is a rare luxury to have an editor who understands how essential and precious that process is for absolutely any writer, and who is able to foster it both actively and passionately.
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