An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [57]
My academic reasons for going to England were to conduct a study of mood disorders in eminent British artists and writers and to work on a medical text about manic-depressive illness that I was writing with a colleague. My time was split between work at St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London and the University of Oxford. They could not have been more different experiences, each wonderful in very different ways. St. George’s, a large teaching hospital now in the middle of one of London’s poorest neighborhoods, was active and lively in the way that good teaching hospitals tend to be. It was 250 years old and had been home to Edward Jenner, the great surgeon John Hunter, and many other clinicians and scientists famous in the history of medicine; the hospital was also the final resting place for Blossom, the cow that Jenner had used in carrying out his smallpox vaccine research. Her somewhat mangy but magnificent hide hung under glass in the medical school library. When I first saw it, at a distance and without my glasses, I thought it was a strange and oddly beautiful abstract painting. I was delighted when I found out it was actually the hide of a cow, and not that of just any cow, but such a medically famous one. There was something very nice about working near Blossom, and I spent many happy hours in her company, working, or thinking about working, and looking up now and again at her motley but charming remains.
Oxford was totally different. I was a senior research fellow of Merton College, one of the three original Oxford colleges founded in the thirteenth century. Merton’s chapel had been built during the same period, and some of its incredibly beautiful, deeply stained glass windows date from then as well. The library, built a century later and one of the finest medieval libraries in England, was also the first to house books upright on shelves instead of keeping them flat in chests. Its collection of early printed books is said to have been hampered by the fact that the college was convinced that the printing press was only a passing fad, one that would never be able to replace handwritten manuscripts. Some of that extraordinary confidence—so unburdened by either the realities of the present or the approaching of the future—still seeps through the Oxford colleges, creating, variously, annoyance or amusement, depending upon one’s mood and circumstance.
I had a lovely suite of rooms at Merton overlooking the playing fields, and I read (albeit with difficulty) and wrote in total peace, interrupted only by a college servant who brought coffee in the mornings and tea in the afternoons. Lunch was almost always with the senior fellows, a remarkably interesting, if occasionally odd, group of senior lecturers and professors representing all fields of study within the university. There were historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and literary scholars, but whenever possible I would sit next to Sir Alister Hardy, the marine biologist, who was a fascinating man and an extraordinary storyteller; I listened for hours to his accounts of his early scientific explorations to Antarctica, as well as his discussions of his ongoing research into the nature of religious experiences. We shared strong common interests in William James and the nature of ecstatic experiences, and he leapfrogged fields, from literature to biology