Researching Edward Jenner

In the West, Jenner is often called "the father of immunology", and his work is said to have "saved more lives than the work of any other human". In Jenner's time, smallpox killed around 10% of the population, with the number as high as 20% in towns and cities where infection spread more easily. In 1821, he was appointed physician to King George IV, and was also made mayor of Berkeley and justice of the peace. A member of the Royal Society, in the field of zoology he was among the first to describe the brood parasitism of the cuckoo (Aristotle also noted this behavior in History of Animals). In 2002, Jenner was named in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons.

Poet and critic Michael Harlow referred to subjects such as 'certitude, the insistently rational and dogmatic ... and the posturing of much prevailing literary narcissism' as being 'challenged and unmasked' in "Writers in Residence".

"Complete Gold Leaves", being his translations and the original Greek texts of Ancient Greek lamellae with messages on the afterlife for adherents of some unknown cult, appeared in 2016 in the magazine Percutio 2016 (number 10, 2016) accompanied by an article on the relevance of the journeys of the dead from Malakula and the small islands (Vanuatu) to 'Aeneid' VI and Greco-Roman mythology. Gold Leaves (Atuanui Press, 2014), outlined his tentative conclusions about the state of research into those "lamellae", and contained all of his translations (without originals) of these texts.

His last book "The Arrow that Missed" (Cold Hub Press 2017) was reviewed in different publications by Johanna Emeney and by critic-poet Jack Ross. The former called attention to his evocations of landscape and the latter to his 'examination of "cracks in the edifice", the things we can never know, can never reconcile with one another'. But perhaps the most comprehensive review of this volume is that by Richard von Sturmer, who examined the prose poem in general and the possibilities 'offered by fragmentation'.