WHEN ROB BUCKMAN first came into the offices, he was looking at the ceiling, wondering whether it was safe to take a breath. Rob was a medical doctor, an oncologist, but most important for us, he was also a comedian, a performer, and an author, a most unusual combination for a most unusual man. He had produced and hosted, with a pleasantly unaffected British accent, a TV series called Magic or Medicine, which debunked many of the alternative medicine cures popular in the last few decades. He was very thin with rounded shoulders, a mop of unruly grey-brown hair, a long face, bushy eyebrows that he could move up and down to express delight or consternation. My bedraggled no-longer-white couch elicited the latter, as did the billowing dust that greeted his arrival in the boardroom.
Born in England, he had begun his acting career at thirteen. Medicine came later.
His first book at Key Porter was I Don’t Know What to Say—How to Help and Support Someone Who Is Dying. Rob had an understanding both of the progress of disease and of the jarringly awkward ways in which medical professionals and family members try to communicate with someone who is dying. Having been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease—dermatomyositis—that was doing its best to kill him, he understood the patient’s view of the medical profession, and the need for frank talk that could give a dying person a chance to say what he or she felt he/she wanted to say.
Rob had tried to demonstrate the effects of his own disease to me by pretending to choke, much to the horror of the uptight maître d’ in the stylish Yonge Street restaurant where we celebrated the publication of his fourth book with Key Porter: Magic or Medicine, based on his TV series.
He said that he was astonished at his own longevity. The prognosis had buried him years ago.
His What You Really Need to Know about Cancer: A Comprehensive Guide for Patients and Their Families answers myriad questions that are obscured behind taboos and misconceptions that keep the cancer sufferer from understanding his own diagnosis. When I told him that Julian’s father had been expected to keep the fact of his cancer a secret from his family, he was not surprised. Cancer was thought not to be a topic for polite conversation. Nor was dying.
Later Rob produced a series of medical information videos with his old Cambridge friend, Monty Python’s John Cleese, and hoped we could cooperate on a series of books based on the videos, but Key Porter was already publishing medical information books for people interested in their own diagnosis. Health guides had become one of our steady, dependable publishing fields, one that even our skeptical bankers understood. I had made a deal with the Canadian Medical Association to endorse our books on arthritis, migraines, eating disorders, epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, and other common ailments. There were similar American series, but I believed that our system, medications, and medical advice were different. That was our reason for commissioning books on women’s health and a large fundraiser for the Hospital for Sick Children on childhood health.
Always the comedian, in his almost-memoir, Not Dead Yet: The Unauthorised Autobiography of Dr. Robert Buckman, Complete with Map, Many Photographs and Irritating Footnotes, Rob predicted that “At my funeral they’re going to play a recording of me saying, ‘Thank you so much for coming. Unlike the rest of you, I don’t have to get up in the morning.’ ”