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http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7757
BMJ 2011; 343 doi: 10.1136/bmj.d7757 (Published 30 November 2011)
Michael Lasserson was a doctor for whom medicine was as much an art as a science. He was especially passionate about the links between medicine and music. A keen double bass player, in 2004 he cofounded the European Doctors Orchestra, an institution that continues to perform in concert halls throughout Europe. Twice a year, once in London and once elsewhere in the continent, as many as 100 doctors from all over Europe gather for a weekend of “furiously hard rehearsal,” to use Michael’s own words.
“Musical ambition fuels our efforts and, for three enchanted days, the three horsemen of the apocalypse—audit, facilitation, and management—are banished from our lives as we assault, with suicidal courage, the commanding heights of the repertoire: Brahms and Sibelius symphonies, Mahler and Tchaikovsky,” he said.
“The orchestra embodies the principle of The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady,” Michael said, “The concertmaster is a neurosurgeon whose desk partner has just completed her general practice training; a junior surgical house officer and a consultant colorectal surgeon are joint principal flute; an Austrian psychiatric registrar and a research pharmacologist from Hungary share the first desk of the double basses; consultant gastroenterologists and anaesthetists share desks with general practitioners, and pathologists play alongside retired surgeons.”
Music and medicine had been profoundly linked for Michael all his life, through his father, Ernest, a professional violinist whose change of career saw him become a general practitioner at the dawn of the NHS. Michael’s mother, Doris, was a pianist, and his uncle Sascha was a violinist who had studied in St Petersburg, from whom a whole generation of British professional musicians learnt the Russian school of string playing. In 2006 Michael edited a fine book of tributes to the late Sascha Lasserson, including his own reminiscences. Even after the untimely death of his mother, Michael kept music alive in the family home. While studying dentistry at Guy’s Hospital, London, he would bring student friends home to play chamber music. However, home life was becoming more difficult with the onset of Ernest’s deafness and increasing isolation.
After doing his first jobs as a dentist in the army and at dental hospitals in London, Michael chose to study again, reading medicine at Charing Cross, where he also conducted the student orchestra. This was when he met and married Nadia Grindea, a piano student at the Royal Academy of Music, and he moved in to live above her parents, finding himself in a very different world: the Grindeas were intensely colourful Romanian émigrés, deeply involved in European music and literature, who hosted European-style salons for writers, artists, actors, and musicians, whom Michael often found himself being dragged downstairs to meet.
Michael’s career stabilised in general practice in Mitcham, Surrey, curiously on the same patch as his late brother John, who was also a general practitioner. Michael confided that he swapped his life as a dentist for that of a medical student so that he could become “a maxillofacial hero.” However, once he started his medical training, it rapidly became clear to him how he wanted to care for his patients: not in fact with the knife of a surgeon, but by being with patients in their darkest hour, wherever and whenever that may be. His concept of a doctor was that you are a witness to events in a patient’s life, events that shape and mould and set a lifetime. He weaved events and experiences from the distant past into decisions about what was needed now, understanding, for example, that what his patients at Nightingale House, originally known as the Home for Aged Jews, had experienced decades before in Europe was crucial for their holistic care.
It was not only the communication between doctor and patient that preoccupied him, it was also communication between doctors. As editor of The Writer, the journal of the Society of Medical Writers, he urged fellow medics to explore and refine their writing skills. He considered this in his article in March 2011 for the British Journal of General Practice about the art of writing a referral letter and his concern that literacy standards were dropping (2011;61:232-3, doi:10.3399/bjgp11X561447). His interest in writing brought him into contact with the GP Writers’ Association, later to become the Society of Medical Writers, whose journal he went on to edit. Michael’s own great pleasure in letter writing often elicited a delighted response, and several years later he would still be enjoying a correspondence with someone whom he had never met.
From the outpouring of international condolences on the news of his death, it is clear that participants of the European Doctors Orchestra value not just the music making but also the exchange of ideas that takes place every time the orchestra meets. In 2007 Michael served as president of the general practice with primary healthcare section at the Royal Society of Medicine, and he used his valedictory address to share how music and medicine had informed his career and life. His legendary modesty may have prevented him from acknowledging that many other careers and lives were informed by him. He leaves Nadia and three children.