The choice of the title “Neither Red Nor Dead” (J. McCarthy’s slogan “Better Dead Than Red”) succinctly reflects the attitude toward life of a dedicated scientist, physician, and a great spirit, Stevo Julius.
Stevo Julius graduated from the Zagreb University School of Medicine in the former Yugoslavia. He first showed interest in psychological aspects of medicine and physiology of hypertension during his specialization in internal medicine in Zagreb, and this is the period of his life he covered in the book.
Since 1964, Stevo Julius has worked in Ann Arbor and recently become a Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Physiology at the University of Michigan, where he spent 40 years on the faculty. He published more than 350 papers and chapters in books on a wide spectrum of issues related to pathophysiology of hypertension, from invasive pharmacologic probes to clinical studies and epidemiology of hypertension. Stevo Julius received numerous awards and distinguished himself as an expert and educator on hypertension. He trained over 50 specialists in hypertension, many of whom became recognized leading experts all across the world. He has been elected honorary member of the Australian, Finnish, Hungarian, Spanish, Polish, and Swedish Hypertension Societies as well as of the European Society of Hypertension.
Stevo Julius was born in a respected Jewish family. His father was a known psychiatrist, his mother an energetic surgical nurse, and his elder brother an internationally recognized political analyst and journalist. During World War II, Stevo was expelled from school and joined partisan fight against fascists in his early teenage years, together with other members of his family.
The book “Neither red no dead” is not a complete and tedious autobiography or memoirs highlighting the exceptional contributions of the author with an aim to satisfy his moral consciousness, as memoirs often do. First of all, Julius is a gifted narrator, telling a rich and interesting story written as fugue in several layers. The core of the narrative are chosen facts and anecdotes, illustrated by quoted dialogues and lyrical description of scenery and circumstances and interwoven with personal accounts of events. In parts, the book reads almost as a thriller, because of internal tensions and emotions, eliciting ever growing interest in the reader.
Julius describes dramatic and dangerous of war, precarious after-war circumstances, and political totalitarianism in which the author himself was involved, but escaped safely. Suicide of his father after he fell a victim of a political conspiracy and fight between political and professional powers is one of the most gripping parts of the book.
The author intended this book primarily for his colleagues and friends, those who do not know what happened during World War II and in years after the new Yugoslavia was established but would find interesting to learn about Stevo’s personal account of controversial times of their youth. The book would also be valuable to younger readers to better understand the past and previous generations, and every reader will certainly recognize moral problems that seem to survive every generation.
The autobiography covers Stevo’s life as a young man, who experienced many threats and human and moral dilemmas and remained optimistic and hopefull in spite of it all. The appealing part is a mixture of naďve observations of a teenager reported by from the perspective of an experienced man.
I was a year younger colleague of Stevo at Zagreb Medical School, and chapter “Learning Medicine” evoked many memories and a wish that the chapter were longer and more detailed. It is interesting how big difference between students in consecutive study years apparently existed at that time. In my memory, contrary to later simplified descriptions, there was quite rich and diversified students’ life, with diverse understandings and aims, besides the “official” political life and formal organization of students. Besides organized formal groups, there were others expressing different interests. For instance in the field of learning, a group was attracted by international relations and started to organize “official” and “unofficial” exchange with colleagues from foreign countries. On the other hand, the Students’ People’s Health Club was spending Sundays in different villages speaking to people, showing educational films, learning and making surveys about peasants’ life and their health needs.
I remember Stevo being a member of the elite among students, determined, powerful, and experienced. He was the editor of the students’ journal Medicinar, an intellectual, determined to his goal, passionate about medical science, a leading person in an informal learning and research interest group.
Immediately after graduation, Stevo Julius had his medical baptism of fire while organizing health care and a hospital in Goražde, a small Bosnian town with a traditional way of life in cultural setting very different from that Julius grew up in. The vivid description of that experience that introduced him to “real life” reflects an interesting combination of love for those simple people and an elitist, sometimes even cynical, belief in superiority of his position and civilization values he represented.
In this autobiography, we witness the development of a scientist from a poor country under adverse conditions. But, such conditions do not always present the limitation; sometimes, they are a stimulating factor. The role of family, personal abilities, experience, moral maturity, strokes of luck, they all play a role, but a strong sense of vocation that a person feels, in Stevo’s case nearly religious belief in the role of science in medicine, possibly has the strongest influence. To be a clinical scientist for Stevo does not mean only a learned skill to neatly collect and describe facts, but to open new ways of thinking and new understanding of an extremely complex system such as a human being is. I quote:
Upon reflection, I still do not fully understand why I became possessed by an irresistible urge to leave the country. I felt rather strongly that I wanted to do research, but it could not have been only that. It must have something to do with my father’s death, with disappointment in my former comrades, with a search for stability in an unpredictability world, and with my inner penchant for adventure.”