Saint Carlo

Carlo Urbani. Carlo Urbani. A name to remember, to mourn and forever to honour.

Carlo Urbani. Carlo Urbani. A name to remember, to mourn and forever to honour.

Dr Carlo Urbani, an Italian doctor we grievously remember now, gave his life for us and died at the age of 46.

We know him as Dr Urbani, but it would seem proper and inevitable that future generations will come to know him as Saint Carlo. For if ever a saint was alive and practising in my time, Dr Urbani was it.

On 26 February this year a Chinese-American businessman, a Mr Chen, was in a hospital in Hanoi suffering from what was first taken to be a special kind of flu picked up from birds.

Then it was thought to be a pneumonia.

But there were some odd atypical symptoms that baffled the doctors.

Somebody said: "Send for Carlo!"

Dr Urbani was a world-ranking expert on parasites but also was thought by his associates to be an uncannily good diagnostician.

He was also the Asian expert on several tropical diseases, especially ones induced by food.

While Dr Urbani sat by Mr Chen's bedside he heard that a nurse in the same hospital appeared to have the same infection.

And then another nurse and another.

Dr Urbani immediately suspected something very rare in the world - a new and highly contagious disease.

He instituted masks, double gowning and then quarantining of a floor and in time of the whole hospital.

He called the public health official closest to the World Health Organisation and told him to alert them at once of a new disease.

By that time it turned out Mr Chen had stayed in a Hong Kong hotel, in a room just vacated by an old doctor visiting from Guangdong, which turned out to be the Asian Silicon Valley, the capital of wireless chips.

Dr Urbani was ready to confirm a rumour that the disease had started so far back as last November but the Chinese, with their normal distaste for citing unfavourable Chinese statistics, had not reported to the World Health Organisation.

When Dr Urbani had taken the drastic step of practically quarantining Hanoi, his wife begged him over the phone from Italy: he must leave Vietnam at once.

They argued. He said: "If I can't work in such a situation what am I here for?"

Here, we now discover, meant on earth.

Throughout his whole professional life, from the time of his being a student, he'd devoted his energies and his skill from dawn to dusk, or midnight, to the afflictions of the poor in many countries.

He chose to holiday in the poorest parts of Africa, always carrying a pack of medicines.

Shortly after his wife's call Dr Urbani felt a little chilly and then he had flu symptoms and sure enough he had the mysterious disease and called for a priest and the last rites.

He died on 29 March.

We also discover he had pioneered the splendid world body known as Doctors Without Borders and last year he accepted on its behalf the Nobel Peace Prize.

I don't know if the Nobel Institute has a rule against making a posthumous award.

If so, they'd better break it. The next Nobel Prize for Medicine surely belongs to Dr Carlo Urbani.

To turn from a tragic worldwide medical puzzle to a benign universal one, I find among a long buried pile of papers several newspaper clippings, cuttings, about another vital question to which there is also yet no known answer.

It's the ever-popular question of longevity. To put it quite simply - why do very old people live so long?

Almost all very old people think they know. Here only the other day is reported the death of a world famous London born Canadian geometrist.

How's that again? Yes geometrist. Several concepts had been named for him.

In the profession, apart from his 12 books, he will be remembered for one sentence.

He said: "For all puzzles there is always one beautiful explanation."

Surely this distinguished scientist knew that longevity is a puzzle for which there is no explanation at all?

Not so. At the end of the tribute to a great career here it is.

He attributed his longevity to vegetarianism and doing 50 push-ups a day - or as Americans prefer to say, on a daily basis.

Two sisters - twins - died in a village that is still a village up by the Hudson River. They'd lived together forever.

They were interviewed when they were 103. It was again their diet but the key to the long healthy years was the regular, unchanging supper.

It consisted of nothing but a double chocolate milkshake, which consists of about a pint of vanilla ice-cream, a dash of milk, a big shot of chocolate syrup, all whisked around in a blender the size of a cut-glass bucket.

Wherever an aficionado received a straw with his milkshake he registered disgust. A decent milkshake should have the consistency, though not the temperature, of molten lava.

And here I find a faded snippet from the New York Times datelined Los Angeles, and the lead sentence carries the astounding news that Margaret Booth, a film editor, had died at the age of 104.

She was a top-flight, greatly admired, film cutter. She started film editing with DW Griffith, the inventor of the cinema's grammar: fade in, fade out, dissolve - those simple devices to show the end of a scene, a mood, a year, which now you have to guess at from the universal practice of what they call a jump cut - a jump from one scene, one continent, one mood to another in one 24th of a second.

Miss Booth polished up the fame of many directors and stars.

I put it that way because I hope the day is coming when the movie-going public will become as sensitive to the editing of a film as, in the past 30, 40 years or so, it has pretended to be about directors, whose names in the early days we scarcely knew - the actors were the stars.

I say this for a simple reason known to everybody in the movie industry and practically nobody outside it - the person who makes or breaks a film is not the scriptwriter or the director but the film editor.

What is astonishing about Miss Booth's obituary is her longevity.

Of all the unhealthy, bent-over occupations, likely to produce hunchback, anaemia and an early end I would, until now, have chosen sitting in a small dark cell with your shoulders permanently rounded, your hands trying to gum together 20 strips of film into a continuous sequence of action that is dramatic, lucid and moving.

Let's hear it then for Margaret Booth, who whatever her theory of longevity, beat all the odds and remains the real creator of Garbo's Camille, the Red Badge of Courage and the original, unbeatable, Mutiny on the Bounty.

Now only last week a most remarkable man died - Dr William Sunderman - a jolly, radiant man who looked like Santa Claus without his whiskers.

He was born in 1898, the year that aspirin was born and only weeks before he died in March he was working on a piece on genetic engineering.

In between he introduced insulin for diabetes to this country from Canada, helped the atomic bomb scientists overcome metal poisoning, wrote 40 books and 300 or more scientific articles, pioneered several medical procedures, founded two medical journals and in the evenings played his Stradivarius well enough to sit in with professionals on the later Beethoven quartets.

He died a month ago at the age of 104.

He had, you'll be pleased to hear, no theories about diet. Longevity? He had no idea. But for him he thought the spur to go on living and loving it was - curiosity.

Dr Sunderman was certainly a happy change from the diet freaks or for that matter the generality of doctors whose useful cop out, especially now genetics is so fashionable, is to say darkly "Ah, you picked the right genes."

Still my favourite longevity explanation is that of President Franklin Roosevelt's first vice-president.

Here you had two Americans, in upbringing and social status the poles apart.

Roosevelt: old Dutch family, protected from the plebs from childhood on by his pampered upbringing on a majestic estate in the Hudson Valley.

And John Nance Garner: a little mole of a man, born dirt poor in the goat country of the Texas Rocky foothills, whose life had taken in the sight of a mother being scalped by a raiding Indian and the launching of the first hydrogen bomb test.

His diet - just to get that out of the way - was, he conceded, fat back pork, beans, pigs' intestines and rot gut whisky.

Once he retired from Roosevelt's New Deal, of which he took a sorry view, he went back to the tiny hometown of Uvalde, Texas, and swore he'd never leave it. He never did.

On his 90th birthday a radio interviewer asked him the inevitable question.

"Longevity?" he said. "Bourbon and water."

On his 99th birthday, the same man was back with the same question.

"To what, Mr Vice-President, do you attribute your longevity?"

"Laying off bourbon and water," he said.

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