Dear Al,

Thank you for remembering me. 
I think of you and the Healthre community
far more often than my silence would suggest.
It is, after all, the only community,
aside from my immediate family and my patients,
that has ever taken me seriously.
And I, for my part, found it unusually stimulating.
The insurance industry's notion of "moral hazard,"
the allegations that some patients are "uninsured by choice"
suggested to me a review
of some of the historically important treatises
on freedom of the will.
I started by reading Luther who told Erasmus
that because man has no free will,
it is impossible to obtain salvation
by contributing to the Building Fund of the Pope.
I went on to read Schopenhauer,
who, very astutely, it seems to me,
admitted that "I can do what I will,"
but pointed out that the will itself is beyond
conscious control: "I cannot will what I will."
More recently, I have been reading Kant,
as it were resuming,
after an interval of 45 years in medicine,
my efforts to interpret this most obscure of writers.
At the same time I have hesitated to rejoin Healthre,
because the hiatus between their interests and mine
makes it as unseeming for me
to press on them an account of my thoughts,
as it would be for me to barge into an
English speaking conference and start babbling German.

My family and I have been well; much better,
as I am accustomed to say, that I deserve.
I have permitted myself be enchanted by my grandchildren
with such extravagance and lack of inhibition
that I feel like one of them,
and I am thrilled to have them for playmates
in my second childhood.
My writing progresses haltingly
as the tide of my imagination rises and falls,
and sometimes seems to run out altogether.
But I have found that I must be patient
with the aridity of my inventiveness,
like one dwelling in the desert
who has stopped cursing the drought
and makes celebration for each drop of rain.

Nothing has happened with my Peer Review Project,
solely I think, because I have neglected
to advertise or promote myself, even on the Internet.
Other projects have seemed of more immediate interest to me,
and I am accustomed to proceed,
in the words of the Quakers, "as way opens".

It is good to learn from your letter that you and your family
have been well. Please stay that way, and give them my regards.

                                       Ernst 
-- 

Ernst J. Meyer, M.D.              review@netcom.com
Cambridge Peer Review Project     finger review@netcom.com
1679 Massachusetts Avenue         ftp ftp.netcom.com  cd pub/re/review
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138    voice phone: 617-868-9307
                                  fax: 617-484-4379

===============   We interpret and audit medical records. ===================