On Dogs Who Work

  Someone told me once that dogs are happier if they have a job, if they have work to do. When I heard this I recalled the sheepdog trials that took place in the fields of Crossburn Farm in Troon, fields that were separated from our back garden in Hunter Crescent...

On Baseball and Winning

  The first baseball game I ever saw was in Houston at the Astrodome in 1980. My companion explained the rules to me. In school in Scotland we had played a similar game called rounders where we hit a tennis ball with an ungloved hand. My Texan friend tried to...

On Call, Cardiac Surgery, and Cupid

The article by Dr. Pauline Chen in the New York Times on trainee physicians work hours prompted my memory of my own call extravaganza. As an intern on the heart surgery service I shared the workload with two other interns, David and Rick (all names have been changed)....

Stitches: The Surgeon, the Saddler and the Tailor.

We all worked with our hands, we just had different tools and worked on different materials, be it fabric, leather, or human tissue. Our basic tools, however, were a needle and thread. When I was growing up in Scotland, I remember studying my dad as he worked at his...

Titanic: 100 Years On.

When the rope was lowered allowing us to enter the Titanic Artifacts Exhibit we were each handed a red rose and a boarding pass for the vessel, bearing a passenger’s name. Our tickets were for April 15th 2012, exactly 100 years from the day the doomed behemoth plunged...