Isaacs 2013 Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health

EDITORIAL

Handwriting

In his recent book subtitled the lost art of handwriting, Philip
Hensher realises suddenly that he has never seen the handwrit-
ing of a close friend and that they communicate purely through
email and text messages.

Are we losing something precious,

Hensher asks, if we lose handwriting? While engaged to be
married, my father went to Australia for a year to work. My
mother remained in England and sent him a handwritten letter
every day. I emigrated from England to Australia 22 years ago
and continue to exchange weekly handwritten letters with
my brother and sister, totalling over 3000 handwritten letters.
When one son was studying overseas, his flatmates were sur-
prised and envious that his father sent him handwritten letters.
I believe our family attitude to letter-writing is unusual nowa-
days, but its rarity suggests that attitudes to handwriting have
changed drastically.

A person’s handwriting is unique, as distinctive as a finger-

print. No two sets of handwriting are identical; even identical
twins have distinct handwriting.

Although my wife did find a

sheet of multiple versions of my signature, of increasing verisi-
militude, in the bedroom of one of our teenagers who was not
averse to wagging school. Handwriting in Arabic script or in
Chinese characters is also unique. Handwriting incorporates
something of our personality and perhaps something of our
humanity. The content and meaning of what we write is the
most critical thing, but we lose something deeply personal and
meaningful if we stop writing by hand. When a friend’s parent
dies, what can replace a handwritten condolence card? Surely
not a condolence email?

In the pre-computer era, handwriting was of enormous

import. We have learned a huge amount about their personality
from the handwritten letters of great human beings. In 2012,
The National Library of Australia in Canberra hosted an exhi-
bition called ‘Handwritten’ featuring hundreds of letters and
sheet music lent by the Berlin State Library (Fig. 1). There were
letters by great scientists (Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Isaac
Newton, Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur and Albert Einstein), great
writers (Dante, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Goethe and
Kafka), great philosophers (Erasmus, Rene Descartes and
Immanuel Kant), great artists (Michelangelo and Joseph
Beuys), intrepid explorers (Captain Cook, David Livingstone
and Fritjof Nansen) and controversial politicians (Machiavelli,
Otto von Bismarck, Napoleon Bonaparte and Karl Marx). There
was also handwritten music by many great musicians including
Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn and Mozart. There was a
version of the Aeneid ascribed to Virgil (70–19 BC) and a manu-
script attributed to the Anglo-Saxon monk the Venerable Bede
who was born in the 7th century. There were letters by the
inventor Daguerre and by Roentgen and one from the great
nurse Florence Nightingale. A particular favourite was an
embossed letter by Louis Braille showing an early version of
what would become his famous writing for the blind. The exhi-
bition featured over a thousand years of handwritten letters and
manuscripts dating back over 2000 years. It was wonderfully
uplifting to see the deeply personal handwriting of such legends
and scary to think that we might be nearing the end of the
handwriting era.

Fig. 1 Love letter about champagne written
by Karl von Meusebach from HANDWRITTEN,
Ten centuries of Manuscript treasures from
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin at the National Library,
Canberra, 2012.

doi:10.1111/jpc.12309

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Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health

49 (2013) 609–610

609

Schoolchildren are often criticised for their illegible handwrit-

ing and a previous editorial

quoted the school report that stated

‘The improvement in his hand-writing has revealed his inability
to spell’. For creative writing, the content is far more important
than legibility. Hensher

devotes a chapter to Dickens and

describes ‘the energy and fury of his great unreadable 19

century handwriting’ (Fig. 2). Hensher describes how the act of
writing a letter is an impetus for the plot in many Dickens
novels, such as Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers and David
Copperfield. In the Handwritten exhibition, Dickens’ letter is a
touching handwritten letter to the recent widow of a writer
commiserating on her loss and assuring her that Dickens’ foun-
dation will take care of her and her children financially. Imagine
if, instead of the Letters of Charles Dickens, we had Dickens’
emails. Or, even worse, Dickens’ Great Tweets. The modern
tendency to reduce communication to snippets of information
such as tweets and sound bites is a recipe for trivialisation.
Furthermore, emails are notoriously open to misinterpretation.

Doctors’ poor handwriting is often ridiculed. One colleague

wrote consultations that even he could not decipher subse-
quently. There are many anecdotes of prescription errors result-
ing from misinterpretation of doctors’ handwriting; hence the
trend to electronic prescribing. In hospitals, electronic health
records are increasingly replacing handwritten case-notes, not
necessarily to good effect. Electronic records are more legible
(although the spelling is sometimes a source of amusement) and
are generally less likely to be lost than paper case notes,
although it is not always easy to find any relevant clinical data

in electronic records. Currently in the Children’s Hospital at
Westmead, electronic records are confined to the two intensive
care wards and the case-notes on other wards are handwritten.
Junior doctors are instructed to date and sign their handwritten
case-note entries, and to add their surname in capital letters and
a contact phone number in case the records need to be checked
later. In outpatients, handwritten case-notes are still preferred
because it is easier to maintain a personal face-to-face conver-
sation while writing than typing.

Doctors will probably continue to need to write legibly by

hand for their work for some years to come. But writing by
hand is also a deeply personal and human activity that we
neglect at our peril. We should all nurture and treasure our
handwriting.

David Isaacs

Editor-in-Chief

Children’s Hospital at Westmead

Westmead

New South Wales

Australia

References

1 Hensher P. The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting (and Why It

Still Matters). London: McMillan, 2012.

2 Srihari S, Huang C, Srinivasan H. On the discriminability of the

handwriting of twins. J. Forensic Sci. 2008;

53: 430–46.

3 Isaacs D. School reports. J. Paediatr. Child Health 2013;

49: 341.

Fig. 2 Letter from Charles Dickens, 1869 in his
‘great unreadable 19

century handwriting’.

D Isaacs

Handwriting

Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health

49 (2013) 609–610

610