Roland, Charles G. 1933–

PERSONAL:

Born January 25, 1933, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; son of John Sanford (an accountant) and Ethel Leona Roland; married Marjorie Kyles, October 16, 1953 (marriage ended, June, 1973); married Connie Lynn Rankin (an actress), September 22, 1979; children: John K., Christopher F., David C., Kathleen S. Ethnicity: "Anglo-Saxon, Canadian." Education: University of Manitoba, M.D., 1958.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Burlington, Ontario, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Practiced medicine in Ontario, Canada, 1959-64; Journal of the American Medical Association, Chicago, IL, senior editor, 1964-69; Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, professor of the history of medicine and chair of department of biomedical communications, 1969-77; McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Jason A. Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine, 1977-99, Hannah Professor emeritus, 1999—. McGill University, Member of board of curators of Osler Library; Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine, coordinator of Osleriana Literature Project, 1978, and Microfiche Collection of Canadian Medical Periodicals, 1982.

MEMBER:

Canadian Society for the History of Medicine (president, 1993-95), American Medical Writers Association (fellow; president, 1968-69), American Association for the History of Medicine, American Osler Society (president, 1986-87).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Jason A. Hannah Medal, Royal Society of Canada, 1994, for Courage under Siege: Disease, Starvation, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto; D.Sc., University of Manitoba, 1997; John P. McGovern Medal, Green College, Oxford University, 2001.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with John P. McGovern) William Osler: The Continuing Education, C.C. Thomas (Springfield, IL), 1969.

(With Lester S. King) Scientific Writing, American Medical Association (Chicago, IL), 1971.

Good Scientific Writing: An Anthology, American Medical Association (Chicago, IL), 1971.

(Editor) E.P. Scarlett, In Sickness and in Health: Reflections on the Medical Profession, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1972.

(With Lynn S. Baker and Gerald S. Gilchrist) You and Leukemia: A Day at a Time, Mayo Comprehensive Cancer Center (Rochester, MN), 1976, revised edition, Saunders (Philadelphia, PA), 1978.

(With Earl F. Nation and John P. McGovern) An Annotated Checklist of Osleriana, Kent State University Press (Kent, OH), 1976, Volume 2, Osler Library, McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2000.

(Editor, with J.D. Key) The Origin of Vaccine Inoculation by Edward Jenner, M.D., F.R.S., Majors Scientific Books (Dallas, TX), 1977.

(With P. Potter) An Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Medical Periodicals, 1826-1975, Clarke, Irwin (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1979.

(Editor and contributor) Health, Disease, and Medicine: Essays in Canadian History, Clarke Irwin (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1983.

Secondary Sources in the History of Canadian Medicine: A Bibliography, Wilfrid Laurier University Press (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), 1985, Volume 2 (with J. Bernier), 2000.

(Editor, with J.A. Barondess and John P. McGovern) The Persisting Osler: Selected Transactions of the First Ten Years of the American Osler Society, University Park Press (Baltimore, MD), 1985.

(Editor, with John P. McGovern) The Collected Essays of Sir William Osler, Volume 1: The Philosophical Essays, Volume 2: The Educational Essays, Volume 3: The Historical and Biographical Essays, Classics of Medicine Library (Birmingham, AL), 1985.

(With Richard L. Golden) Sir William Osler, 1849-1919: An Annotated Bibliography with Illustrations, Norman Publications (San Francisco, CA), 1988.

Clarence Hincks: Mental Health Crusader, Dundurn Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

Courage under Siege: Disease, Starvation, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor, with Henry Friedlander and Benno Muller-Hill) Medicine without Compassion: Past and Present, Hamburger Stiftung für Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, Germany), 1992.

Harold N. Segall: Pioneer of Canadian Cardiology, Fitzhenry & Whiteside (Markham, Ontario, Canada), 1994.

(Editor, with J.A. Barondess) The Persisting Osler 2: Selected Transactions of the Second Ten Years of the American Osler Society, Robert E. Krieger (Melbourne, FL), 1994.

Long Night's Journey into Day: Details of POW Life in the Camps at Hong Kong, Wilfrid Laurier University Press (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

Contributor to books, including Books, Manuscripts, and the History of Medicine, edited by P.M. Teigen, Science History Publications, 1982; Life in Niagara in the Capital Period, 1792-1796; and British Trials of Japanese War Criminals, 1946-1948, edited by John R. Pritchard. Author of "Thoughts about Medical Writing," a bimonthly column in Anesthesia and Analgesia, 1970-76, and "Ontario Archives," a biweekly column in Ontario Medicine, beginning 1982. Contributor of more than 600 articles and reviews to medical and history journals. Editor of Research in Progress, a journal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, 1982-90.

SIDELIGHTS:

Charles G. Roland once told CA: "To date my writing has been entirely nonfiction. As a historian my motivation for writing is the professional urge to make my findings and interpretations available to colleagues and the reading public."

Roland later added: "You can't remember what first gets you interested in writing: it's like a drug or alcohol addiction. There was never a before. Tolstoy particularly influenced my work: War and Peace isn't just a great novel, it's a very perceptive historical account of the Napoleonic wars. Tolstoy was the first real revisionist military historian. My writing process consists of being up by five o'clock every morning and writing for at least an hour, sometimes two hours. Everything else is revision. My model is the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich, who wrote out complete orchestral scores: I try to produce text that's as close to being finished on the first go as I can make it.

"The most surprising thing I've learned as a writer is that otherwise sensible and intelligent people want you to autograph the books of yours they've bought. I had no idea, and it still makes me uncomfortable. When you look back, every book is a disaster—you're never satisfied with how it ended up. I suppose I'm the proudest of the Grant book: I basically wrote most of it on a laptop out in the country in northeastern Louisiana where we had evacuated after Katrina (after, not before, we stayed for the storm). I had to do it largely from memory, as the only book on the Civil War the local library had was a very dog-eared copy of something by Bruce Catton. My hope for the effects my books will have is that readers will get interested in finding out what actually happened, as opposed to simply repeating by rote what several generations of Anglo-American historians have insisted happened. If nothing else, I hope they take away something useful."