Harry Keen Contribution
Part I
While you are at it, don’t forget the splendid Dr Joan Walker who hurried back from Cambridge Mass in the early 1950s where she had met one young fellow, Leo Krall by name who had just completed a ‘Diabetes Detection Drive’, as he told me at the behest of his chief, one Elliot P Joslin (Wilkerson HLC, Krall LP. Diabetes in a New England town: a study of 3516 115. persons in Oxford, Mass. ]AMA 1947;135:209-216). When Joan (whose personal story I shall tell you some time) got back to England she undertook a Cambridge-like survey in the village of Ibstock, Leicestershire (COMMUNITY SURVEY OF DIABETES Diabetes in an English Community. A Study of its Incidence and Natural History. By Joan B. Walker, M.D., and David Kerridge, B.Sc. (Pp. 46; illustrated. 7s. 6d.) Leicester:Leicester University Press. 1961). Joan it was, by then a most distinguished very British Lady Physician, who was part of the British group (with me and John Jarrett) which founded the EDESG (now EDEG see Fig 1) in December 1966. You will recall that that first meeting was in Berlin, Day 1 in E Berlin, Day 2 in W Berlin. At the height of the Cold War, we crossed Checkpoint Charlie at 1 am with fine snow falling when, on the E side, I was taken into a little back room for carrying seditious literature (I had bought the complete works of Marx and Engels – 36 bloody volumes of it - for my brother in law who was Professor of Politics at Leeds University). I was summarily directed to a little room without windows while John and Joan stood outside wondering what the hell was happening and whether I would ever emerge. What happened thereafter will have to wait for the official history of diabetes epidemiology.