(At the age of 54, Michael Gearin-Tosh discovered he had b...)
At the age of 54, Michael Gearin-Tosh discovered he had bone marrow cancer. This is the story of his quest to manage and overcome his illness; his determination to not be coerced into joining programs of invasive treatments; and his resolve to stand up to the NHS, specialists, and colleagues who encouraged him to follow the conventional route as a cancer patient. The author selected a number of regimes and devised his own routine and diets, and six years on he still survives, despite being told he should "expect to die soon." This is not a "how-to" book, but an account of one man's quest to listen to his inner voice of intuition.
Michael Gearin-Tosh was an Australian teacher of English literature at St. Catherine's College. He achieved wider notoriety when he published a book about his long struggle with cancer during which he relied on a grueling regime of alternative treatments.
Background
Michael Gearin-Tosh was born on January 16, 1940, in Nambour, Queensland, Australia. He was a son of Clifford Gearin, a surgeon, who died when Gearin-Tosh was a baby. He spent much of his life looking in both men and women for the father figure he had lost. When he was four, his mother remarried and the family moved to Scotland. Her husband was Captain Tosh, a Scottish gentleman farmer. He had an unhappy relationship with his step-father, who treated him unkindly. Michael Gearin-Tosh later painted his stepfather - whose surname he was required to conjoin with that of his own father - as something of a tyrant. His favorite hiding place in the Perthshire farmhouse where they lived, he said, was the kitchen, and his firmest friend the cook. Until the age of 11, he also refused to part with the small leather suitcase which he had brought with him from Australia. It contained his favorite collections of fairy tales; no one was allowed to touch it and he insisted on carrying it everywhere, ready for the journey "home." He was devoted to his mother, and, as he helped around the farm, so he lent a hand with her breeding of cocker spaniels.
Education
In Scotland, Michael Gearin-Tosh attended Aberdeen Grammar School and then Dundee High School. He excelled in a variety of subjects, for a long time staying uncertain whether to study botany, English, or the classics at the university level. At the age of 17, he won an open scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1957, but had to postpone it, on account of his youth, meanwhile studying philosophy at St. Andrew's University. He received a Bachelor of Arts in 1961 and a Master of Arts in 1964 from the University of Oxford.
After graduating, Michael Gearin-Tosh became a junior lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford, and, in 1965, a research fellow at St. Catherine's College. For a while, he assisted Rachel Trickett, later principal of St. Hugh's College, with her important book The Honest Muse: A Study in Augustan Verse (1967). Together, they resurrected the reputation of the poet John Oldham and his satires against the Jesuits. But Gearin-Tosh never produced his own academic book. A magnum opus on Andrew Marvell was eventually put aside. His admirers had to be content with short, dense, elegant articles published in learned journals.
Michael Gearin-Tosh's own research interests at this time included William Collins and the English Augustans, Dryden, Pope, and Swift. Towards the end of his life, he was working on what would have been a superb edition of Marvell had he lived to complete it. He was elected a tutorial fellow of St. Catherine's in 1971, and served as librarian and, for a while, as domestic bursar, greatly improving the quality of college food. From 1988 to 1990, he was the vice-master of the college. He took a welfare role in acting as the university assessor in 1988-1989 and played a large part in the running of the English faculty. It was as a tutor that Gearin-Tosh shone brightest. His approach, partly shaped by his Scottish upbringing, was one of close textual scholarship. Pupils were encouraged to read carefully before constructing grand theories. He was an expert at spotting the able pupil who had not yet blossomed. Having sympathetically received relatively commonplace ideas, he would accompany students to more commanding heights. His purpose was not to produce future academics but men and women who would go out into the world with rigorous and curious minds.
Theatre was one of Michael's greatest interests. Writing and directing absorbed him, in opera as well as plays. His enthusiasm inspired others, and led to the association of St. Catherine's with the Cameron Mackintosh Chair of contemporary theatre, whose visiting holders have included Peter Shaffer, Arthur Miller, Richard Eyre, Alan Ayckbourn, Stephen Sondheim, Diana Rigg, and Patrick Marber. He also helped to establish an award which has since enabled many St. Catherine's students to train with London Weekend Television.
Living Proof: a medical mutiny, published in 2002, was his first and only book, and it is a great one - eloquent, moving, and persuasive. The blocks that had impeded a substantial academic work were triumphantly removed. All Michael Gearin-Tosh's finest qualities as a man and a critic are on display: his learning, his compassion, his rebelliousness, his skepticism about some doctors, his dislike of pretension and pomposity, and his irrepressible sense of the absurd.
As he explains in his book, Gearin-Tosh decided to forego conventional treatment for a number of reasons. He begins his story in journal form with an almost lighthearted account of his learning of his illness and the impact it has on him. The overwhelming advice from medical experts was that he receive chemotherapy as the only chance for possibly prolonging his life. But Gearin-Tosh did not panic. Similar to the training he had received in studying literature, he mulled the situation over as he would the subtext of a classic novel. The author felt at times like he was being pushed into a specific treatment with little consideration for his own wishes or his ultimate fate, and he began to analyze the experts' words and the meaning behind their medical jargon.
The author devotes a large portion of the book to explain why he and some others believe the alternative regimen was the most likely reason for his cure and that he is the "living proof." However, the author is careful and smart enough to note that there is no absolute or irrefutable evidence that his alternative treatments were the reason for his survival.
The book also includes an appendix of the author's medical history; a list of the specialists he consulted, including a discussion of the author's case by his primary physician, Oxford University's senior professor of Medicine, Sir David Weatherall and also by the Mayo Clinic's senior professor of Myeloma, Robert Kyle; and a peer-reviewed case history by Carmen Wheatley.
(At the age of 54, Michael Gearin-Tosh discovered he had b...)
2002
Personality
Michael Gearing-Tosh picked and cherished his college students with great care. Many of his students became what his friend Iris Murdoch described as "pals for life." Another great friend, Professor Lord David Cecil, used to say that Michael Gearing-Tosh had the gift of showing how to get the best out of the university and out of life, without taking either of them too seriously.
Dennis Horgan, Michael Gearing-Tosh's senior colleague in English at St. Catherine's, said that he possessed "intellectual strength combined with the most refined sensibility - a mind one only comes across very rarely."
Physical Characteristics:
Diagnosed in 1994 with incurable cancer of the blood and immune system called multiple myeloma, Michael Gearin-Tosh gambled and decided not to have chemotherapy. Instead, he decided to pursue an alternative approach. Gearin-Tosh devised an exhausting regime consisting of 12 freshly-made vegetable juices a day, high-dose vitamin injections, acupuncture, raw garlic, coffee enemas, Chinese breathing exercises, and the visualization of his immune cells attacking the tumor. The odds were approximately one in 20,000 that he would survive. Rejecting the option of chemotherapy, he wrote a remarkable book about his unconventional self-treatment, entitled Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny. The humor and high spirits of his approach to his illness have certainly given comfort and consolation, as well as hope and amusement, to fellow-sufferers. He did not succumb to cancer that he had held at bay so long, but from a virulent blood infection that spread alarmingly fast. This for him was a kind of victory. His last words on the earth were: "Let it go."
Interests
garden design, theatre
Writers
Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, William Shakespeare
Connections
Michael Gearin-Tosh had many friends from all walks of life, and he died surrounded by some of them. Gearin-Tosh's life partner for nearly 11 years was Arkadiusz Weremczuk, a fashion designer.