Ingrid Bergman was born at the end of August 1915, one year after the start of WWI, grew up as Europe was descending into chaos, and was a young adult during WWII.
So was Miss Helen Patience Uprichard, who was first known as Patience Uprichard, then Dr Patience Uprichard and finally Dr Patience Uprichard Dodgson click here.
Scroll down for videos focused on Ingrid Bergman, who was young, fair, gorgeous, competent and hard-working at the same time as my mother. Ingrid was taller, and healthier for longer. But she did not live as long.
|
News feed from The Local in Sweden
|
|
Map, flag and information from Wikipedia.
|
News feed from Swedish Medical Products Agency
|
Sweden when the snow covered the ground before the apples were picked from the trees. SJ Dodgson. MJoTA 2013 v7n2 p0808
I visited Sweden in 1990, 1993, twice, and 1994. What brought me there, in the summer of 1990, was a histological technique that was used in a lab at the Sweriges Lantbruk Universitet that was testimony to the constancy of a Swedish scientist, Yvonne Ridderstrale.
Dr Ridderstrale had set up her lab around a technique for measuring carbon dioxide movement on thin slices of tissues. You can grind up tissues all you want and measure carbon dioxide movement in parts from all over the body - which I did - but until you can see what is happening, and where, you really are only guessing.
I saw Dr Ridderstrale's beautiful pictures for the first time during a conference in Manhattan, and then again in London at a conference I helped organize 5 years later when I was 7 months pregnant. The next conference, in Spoleto, in Italy, which I attended with my baby and my husband: that was when I decided I needed to go to Sweden and hang out in Dr Ridderstrale's lab for some weeks or months.
In 1990, I helped organize the scientific program of a conference in Hannover, Germany, drove my 3 sons and a babysitter to the airport in New York City, and spent the summer hopping around the United States and Europe. My sons and husband were in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, the most beautiful area of Germany, where my husband worked as a physicist and in his spare time, marathon skied and cycled, and invented scores of devices and techniques. His brilliant formula for predicting the stock market, well, that is another story. It didn't work.
I flew to Sweden and spent a week with Dr Ridderstrale in early August. Out of the lab, saunas, swims naked in lakes. Oh! I was pregnant, but a vigorous bicycle ride with my 3 sons up, up a mountain in Germany ended that dramatically in the flight home to New York.
However, in Sweden, we laid the groundwork for my return, and in 1992, the day after Bill Clinton was elected president, I heard from Sweden that the government had granted me some tens of thousands of dollars to return to Sweden to work with Dr Ridderstrale on diabetic cows.
We had fun, I worked hard, I gave lectures on carbon dioxide, I traveled by ferry to Finland and back overland by ice that looked like it was on fire.
I had returned to Sweden the day after my birthday in early October, when the snow was 2 feet deep and the apples were still on the trees.
I had conceived not long before I got on the train for the 24-h train ride to Sweden, and in Sweden Dr Ridderstrale made me get a pregnancy test, and for fun, got me an ultrasound in the animal radiology department.
My daughter was born the following July, in New Jersey, after visits from several members of the Swedish physiology department.
Not long after that, the huge strains of being a single parent to 4 children with my husband in Germany and my ex-husband taking me to court once or twice a year while holding me hostage in the United States: I left the laboratory, swallowed whole every book on grammar that I could find, broke up with my husband, and re-invented myself as a medical writer.
Sweden always was kind to me, always believed in me. A good country. A blessed country. But damned cold.
|
|
![Location of Sweden (dark green)– in Europe (green & dark grey)– in the European Union (green) — [Legend]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/EU-Sweden.svg/250px-EU-Sweden.svg.png)