Crown Publishers, New York, NY, 2010, 369 pages, $26.00.
Pre-Print copy for the Journal of Legal Medicine
Reviewed by Kate Scannell, M.D., F.A.C.P.*
ENCOUNTERING HENRIETTA LACKS
Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s new book is a gripping read that embodies all abstractions about research ethics in a compelling tale about Henrietta Lacks – a woman whose microscopic cancerous cells shook the world’s medical establishment in 1951.“
Doubtless, before the publication of this book, few people outside of medical or research circles would have recognized that name. But for many of us insiders, “Henrietta Lacks” routinely and mysteriously figured into our witnessing of major medical advances within the last six decades, into ground-breaking discoveries about cancer treatments and the Salk polio vaccine, into the daily routines of many lone scientists sitting endless hours at their research benches in companionship with her “immortal” cells.
I first “encountered” Henrietta Lacks in the early 1980s – more than three decades after she had died from cervical cancer in 1951. I had been asked to assist a fellow researcher with his experiment, by concocting various broths and “prepping” the cells he would require. Eager to avoid the tedium of my own research project, I dutifully assembled the requisite ingredients and glassware. And, as he had recommended, I met with “The Guy” who oversaw our cell cultures so I could learn how to handle them properly.
“These are HeLa cells,” he informed me as he gently handed over a culture bottle on which was scrawled various numbers and initials. He explained that the cells were from an “eternal” human lineage – faithfully and perpetually reproducing for decades, generously providing researchers around the world with a standardized and plentiful supply of cells for experimental purposes.
His astounding description left me awestruck. I had been taught that all human cells were programmed to die – it was part of the natural order. What unique biophysical property did these undying cells possess? What separated these immortal cells from claims of the divine?
The Guy” couldn’t answer these questions. But he did offer that the cells had been so-named with the initials of the woman from whom they’d been taken: “Henrietta Lacks.”
The following hour or so that I spent under a sterile hood prepping those HeLa cells affected me deeply. And though mesmerized by the cells’ disembodied immortality, I was more powerfully preoccupied with their personification. I became intensely curious about Henrietta Lacks – the person whom those cells survived. Regrettably, however, I could find no illuminating information about her in the medical texts available to me back then.
“. . . ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER OF DEATH”
It is now 2010 and, sorting through the new arrivals at my local bookstore, I stumble upon “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. On its dust jacket is an arresting photograph of a beautiful and clear-eyed woman who seems to be looking straight through time, to the precise moment in which I look at her. The cover text underneath the book’s title reads: “Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and a multi-million dollar industry. More than twenty years later, her children found out. Their lives would never be the same.”
I purchase the book and read it in one day. And, although made newly aware of many vital details that characterize Henrietta’s life, still, I keenly feel her abiding absence. Indeed, having left no words or first-person narrative of her own, her story is wholly reconstructed through the second-hand accounts of family members and doctors. In the end, she remains – immortally – without a voice that we hear, without an identity of her own making.
Tellingly, even Henrietta’s name was often misrepresented or confused within various medical and lay publications about HeLa cells. She died without an obituary [p. 89] and was buried in an unmarked grave. [p. 121]
In 1999, the book’s author visits Henrietta’s birthplace in Virginia – located off Route 360, “just past Difficult Creek on the banks of the River of Death.” [p. 76] There Skloot hopes to find and interview any family members still living in the mile-long subsection of the area known as “Lacks Town.” She drives past an unpainted shack that marks its entry and soon encounters Cootie, Henrietta’s first cousin. He tells Skloot: “Everybody in Lacks Town kin to Henrietta, but she been gone so long, even her memory pretty much dead now. . . . Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells.” [pp. 79-80] Ten years later, when Skloot revisits the town where Henrietta grew up tending gardens and “planting tobacco behind mule-drawn plows.” [p. 19] it is virtually gone and ". . . it felt like everything related to Henrietta’s history was vanishing.” [p. 306]
The historical invisibility of women, blacks, and impoverished Americans is a figurative “river of death” that courses throughout this book. It is not only Henrietta’s life which is submerged, but also the lives of her community and family members. A profoundly heartbreaking example of this involves Elsie, one of Henrietta’s two daughters, who was committed with the problematic diagnosis of “idiocy” to the Crownsville State Hospital – known formerly as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. In 1955, four years after Henrietta’s death and at the age of fifteen, Elsie died in that gruesome asylum all alone and unbeknownst to her sister, Deborah, through whom much of Henrietta’s story is told. [p. 45; p. 117]
In 2001, the author accompanies Deborah to Crownsville to fulfill her promise to help “figure[e] out what happened to Elsie.” [p. 268] They meet a hospital director who informs them that most of the medical records from that time period had been contaminated by asbestos and “carted away in bags and buried.” [p. 271] Still, because of some personal “habit of collecting potentially historic documents” [p. 271] he is able to locate an autopsy report and photograph of Elsie that he stored in a closet near his desk. In that photograph, Elsie “stares somewhere just below the camera, crying, her face misshapen and barely recognizable” and she “appears to be screaming” while her “head is twisted unnaturally to the left, chin raised and held in place by a large pair of white hands.” [p. 273] In the end, the “picture” of Elsie we are left holding is one of terrible deafening silence, literalized by hands around her small throat.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS LEFT UNANSWERED
The medical research establishment figures prominently in this book, primarily in the ways it regarded Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells. With a mostly even-hand, Skloot holds up a lens through which she views the doctors and researchers who populated not only the hospitals and research labs where Henrietta and her cells resided, but also the urgent medical questions that were left unanswered for the Lacks family.
Yet, for this reader, it is the brief side-trip to Crownsville that provides the most vividly distilled impression about the research establishment. Skloot, while trying to learn what happened to Elsie, uncovers troubling information about ostensibly covert research activities at Crownsville. The hospital director shares his private trove of documents and newspaper clippings with Skloot, allowing her to determine that, while Elsie was at Crownsville, “scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent.” [p. 275] Research sometimes included the insertion of “metal probes into patients’ brains” or pneumoencephalography – a painful (and now archaic) procedure in which holes are drilled through a person’s skull, and spinal fluid is replaced with air in order to obtain clearer X-ray images of the brain. [pp. 275-6] The hospital director evaluates the data at his disposal and makes a calculated guess that Elsie had been studied. [p. 276]
As affecting as they are, still, these haunting images and alarming reports concerning Elsie and Crownsville do not take center stage under the hot lights cast upon the research establishment. For that, we are transported to Baltimore; it is 1951, and Henrietta Lacks is seeking medical care for cervical cancer at John Hopkins Hospital – a charity hospital with a segregated ward for black patients. Before she receives caustic radium treatment, two “dime-sized” samples of her cervical tissue are removed, allegedly without her permission. The samples are given to George Gey, a tissue-culture scientist who for years has struggled to develop a continuously reproducing human cell line that could facilitate and advance cancer research.
As it turns out, Henrietta would die several months later, at 31 years of age. Her cancerous cells, however, would survive her and proliferate wildly in Gey’s lab, “with mythological intensity.” [p. 40] He would freely distribute them to scientists throughout the world who, in turn, would often make amazing medical discoveries. Over time, for-profit cell banks and biotech companies would enter the picture and launch a “multimillion-dollar” industry from a “dime”-sized sample of Henrietta’s cervix.
Meanwhile, Henrietta’s children would struggle financially – some of them unable to afford basic health care – and they would not even learn about their mother’s scientific legacy for decades to come. When first contacted by John Hopkins officials in 1973, they come to understand that the doctors want to test them for cancer, so they willingly comply with blood sampling. As Henrietta’s husband later recounts: “They said they got my wife and she part alive. . . . They been doin experiments on her and they wanted to test my children see if they got that cancer killed their mother.” [p. 182] But, as the family grimly discovers, there’s been an abysmal misunderstanding – in fact, the doctors only wanted the family’s samples in order to conduct further HeLa cell experimentation. This painful revelation arrives as a shock for Deborah who for days had been phoning Hopkins for her “cancer results,” anxiously dreading that she may have inherited her mother’s fatal disease. [p. 185]
The family’s formidable distrust of researchers and doctors only expands when in 1976, reading an article in Rolling Stone magazine, they also learn about massive commercial profiteering from HeLa cells. [p. 193] As Deborah remarks, “. . . if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime.” [p. 9]
A SPECIMEN’S RED TOE NAILS
And yet, above all else, it is the doctors’ casual disregard and thudding incuriosity about the family’s interest in their mother as a person and human being that destroys any last vestige of their trust. When Skloot makes her initial phone contact with Deborah and proposes writing a book about her mother, Deborah eagerly responds that such a book would be “great.” Only one-year old when Henrietta died, Deborah has tired of everyone’s focus on her mother as though she were just some dehumanized assortment of cells. “Everything always about just the cells and don’t even worry about her name and was HeLa even a person.” [p. 52] She asks, “You know what I really want? I want to know, what did my mother smell like? For all my life I just don’t know anything, not even the little common things, like what color she like? Did she like to dance?” [p. 53]
For decades, no researchers inform or consult with the Lacks family about the nature and scope of their experimentation with Henrietta’s cells. Instead, popular media bombard the Lacks siblings with disturbing and weirdly evocative depictions of their mother whose early death left them with few memories of her. Deborah sees “a Newsweek article called PEOPLE-PLANTS that said that scientists had crossed Henrietta Lacks’s cells with tobacco cells” which leads her to fear “they’d created a human plant-monster that was half her mother, half tobacco.” [p. 196] Hearing that scientists had used HeLa cells to study viruses like AIDS and Ebola, Deborah imagines “her mother eternally suffering the symptoms of each disease: bone-crushing pain, bleeding eyes, suffocation.” [p. 196] She is horrified to read that some people have even tried to kill HeLa cells. [p. 196]
Even while Henrietta lay dying a painful and agonizing death in the hospital, doctors write in the medical record: “Henrietta is still a miserable specimen.” [p. 66] Later, during Henrietta’s autopsy, one of Gey’s assistants charged with collecting additional pathology samples gasps when she suddenly notes that “Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish.” [p. 90] Recounting that episode years later, the assistant explains: “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in the bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.” [pp. 90-1]
A STORY MANY-STORIED
This story is many-storied – not only about “HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks, but of Henrietta’s family – particularly Deborah – and their life-long struggle to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible.” [p. 7] Their colossal struggle intimately involves issues of race, gender, poverty, class, and healthcare inequality. It raises substantial questions about medical practice and research ethics, about societal care of the mentally ill, about the moral conduct of journalistic inquiry into other peoples’ lives. It ignites legal and ethical debates about tissue ownership and the commercialization of human biological materials.
When the struggle is fueled by depersonalization and dehumanization of Henrietta Lacks and her family, we also wrestle with great philosophical disturbances; at this level, the book sounds a cautionary note about the valorization of medical and scientific “objectivity.” We see how claims to such objectivity can actually derive from the denial of someone’s subjectivity. How the “progress” of scientific research can depend upon dehumanizing the body and its parts which hauntingly reside as “specimens” within the freezers of commercial biobanks and unregulated storage facilities scattered throughout the country.
But underneath all of this – stripped bare of scientific mind, of political and ideological counsel, of celestial advisement and legal consideration, of professional belonging and identity – I would have to say that the book tells a remarkably simple story infused with a very old theme. In essence, the story is a fiercely human tale about the importance of seeing one another in the clarifying light of each other’s unique and radiant mortal being. We are reminded that this sometimes requires faith and forgiveness, the acute notice of a corpse’s painted toe nails, or a road trip to Crownsville. But, always, it requires a basic respect for persons that calls on us to seek each other out with curiosity and compassion, rejecting utilitarian yardsticks to measure our humanity or the value of others’ lives. There is a moral to the story, and it is fully captured by Elie Wiesel in the book’s epigraph:
“We must not see any person as an abstraction.
Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets,
With its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish,
And with some measure of triumph.”
-------------------------------
Kate Scannell is a physician and the author of the memoir, "Death of the Good Doctor." Her new novel is "Flood Stage."
This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration in the Journal of Legal Medicine (c) 2010 [copyright Taylor & Francis]. The
Journal of Legal Medicine is available online at:
http://www.informaworld.com, and this article is available at the following open URL address:
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=[paper
issn]&volume=31&issue=4&spage=[starting page of article]
Pre-Print copy for the Journal of Legal Medicine
Reviewed by Kate Scannell, M.D., F.A.C.P.*
ENCOUNTERING HENRIETTA LACKS
Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s new book is a gripping read that embodies all abstractions about research ethics in a compelling tale about Henrietta Lacks – a woman whose microscopic cancerous cells shook the world’s medical establishment in 1951.“
Doubtless, before the publication of this book, few people outside of medical or research circles would have recognized that name. But for many of us insiders, “Henrietta Lacks” routinely and mysteriously figured into our witnessing of major medical advances within the last six decades, into ground-breaking discoveries about cancer treatments and the Salk polio vaccine, into the daily routines of many lone scientists sitting endless hours at their research benches in companionship with her “immortal” cells.
I first “encountered” Henrietta Lacks in the early 1980s – more than three decades after she had died from cervical cancer in 1951. I had been asked to assist a fellow researcher with his experiment, by concocting various broths and “prepping” the cells he would require. Eager to avoid the tedium of my own research project, I dutifully assembled the requisite ingredients and glassware. And, as he had recommended, I met with “The Guy” who oversaw our cell cultures so I could learn how to handle them properly.
“These are HeLa cells,” he informed me as he gently handed over a culture bottle on which was scrawled various numbers and initials. He explained that the cells were from an “eternal” human lineage – faithfully and perpetually reproducing for decades, generously providing researchers around the world with a standardized and plentiful supply of cells for experimental purposes.
His astounding description left me awestruck. I had been taught that all human cells were programmed to die – it was part of the natural order. What unique biophysical property did these undying cells possess? What separated these immortal cells from claims of the divine?
The Guy” couldn’t answer these questions. But he did offer that the cells had been so-named with the initials of the woman from whom they’d been taken: “Henrietta Lacks.”
The following hour or so that I spent under a sterile hood prepping those HeLa cells affected me deeply. And though mesmerized by the cells’ disembodied immortality, I was more powerfully preoccupied with their personification. I became intensely curious about Henrietta Lacks – the person whom those cells survived. Regrettably, however, I could find no illuminating information about her in the medical texts available to me back then.
“. . . ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER OF DEATH”
It is now 2010 and, sorting through the new arrivals at my local bookstore, I stumble upon “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. On its dust jacket is an arresting photograph of a beautiful and clear-eyed woman who seems to be looking straight through time, to the precise moment in which I look at her. The cover text underneath the book’s title reads: “Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and a multi-million dollar industry. More than twenty years later, her children found out. Their lives would never be the same.”
I purchase the book and read it in one day. And, although made newly aware of many vital details that characterize Henrietta’s life, still, I keenly feel her abiding absence. Indeed, having left no words or first-person narrative of her own, her story is wholly reconstructed through the second-hand accounts of family members and doctors. In the end, she remains – immortally – without a voice that we hear, without an identity of her own making.
Tellingly, even Henrietta’s name was often misrepresented or confused within various medical and lay publications about HeLa cells. She died without an obituary [p. 89] and was buried in an unmarked grave. [p. 121]
In 1999, the book’s author visits Henrietta’s birthplace in Virginia – located off Route 360, “just past Difficult Creek on the banks of the River of Death.” [p. 76] There Skloot hopes to find and interview any family members still living in the mile-long subsection of the area known as “Lacks Town.” She drives past an unpainted shack that marks its entry and soon encounters Cootie, Henrietta’s first cousin. He tells Skloot: “Everybody in Lacks Town kin to Henrietta, but she been gone so long, even her memory pretty much dead now. . . . Everything about Henrietta dead except them cells.” [pp. 79-80] Ten years later, when Skloot revisits the town where Henrietta grew up tending gardens and “planting tobacco behind mule-drawn plows.” [p. 19] it is virtually gone and ". . . it felt like everything related to Henrietta’s history was vanishing.” [p. 306]
The historical invisibility of women, blacks, and impoverished Americans is a figurative “river of death” that courses throughout this book. It is not only Henrietta’s life which is submerged, but also the lives of her community and family members. A profoundly heartbreaking example of this involves Elsie, one of Henrietta’s two daughters, who was committed with the problematic diagnosis of “idiocy” to the Crownsville State Hospital – known formerly as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. In 1955, four years after Henrietta’s death and at the age of fifteen, Elsie died in that gruesome asylum all alone and unbeknownst to her sister, Deborah, through whom much of Henrietta’s story is told. [p. 45; p. 117]
In 2001, the author accompanies Deborah to Crownsville to fulfill her promise to help “figure[e] out what happened to Elsie.” [p. 268] They meet a hospital director who informs them that most of the medical records from that time period had been contaminated by asbestos and “carted away in bags and buried.” [p. 271] Still, because of some personal “habit of collecting potentially historic documents” [p. 271] he is able to locate an autopsy report and photograph of Elsie that he stored in a closet near his desk. In that photograph, Elsie “stares somewhere just below the camera, crying, her face misshapen and barely recognizable” and she “appears to be screaming” while her “head is twisted unnaturally to the left, chin raised and held in place by a large pair of white hands.” [p. 273] In the end, the “picture” of Elsie we are left holding is one of terrible deafening silence, literalized by hands around her small throat.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS LEFT UNANSWERED
The medical research establishment figures prominently in this book, primarily in the ways it regarded Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells. With a mostly even-hand, Skloot holds up a lens through which she views the doctors and researchers who populated not only the hospitals and research labs where Henrietta and her cells resided, but also the urgent medical questions that were left unanswered for the Lacks family.
Yet, for this reader, it is the brief side-trip to Crownsville that provides the most vividly distilled impression about the research establishment. Skloot, while trying to learn what happened to Elsie, uncovers troubling information about ostensibly covert research activities at Crownsville. The hospital director shares his private trove of documents and newspaper clippings with Skloot, allowing her to determine that, while Elsie was at Crownsville, “scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent.” [p. 275] Research sometimes included the insertion of “metal probes into patients’ brains” or pneumoencephalography – a painful (and now archaic) procedure in which holes are drilled through a person’s skull, and spinal fluid is replaced with air in order to obtain clearer X-ray images of the brain. [pp. 275-6] The hospital director evaluates the data at his disposal and makes a calculated guess that Elsie had been studied. [p. 276]
As affecting as they are, still, these haunting images and alarming reports concerning Elsie and Crownsville do not take center stage under the hot lights cast upon the research establishment. For that, we are transported to Baltimore; it is 1951, and Henrietta Lacks is seeking medical care for cervical cancer at John Hopkins Hospital – a charity hospital with a segregated ward for black patients. Before she receives caustic radium treatment, two “dime-sized” samples of her cervical tissue are removed, allegedly without her permission. The samples are given to George Gey, a tissue-culture scientist who for years has struggled to develop a continuously reproducing human cell line that could facilitate and advance cancer research.
As it turns out, Henrietta would die several months later, at 31 years of age. Her cancerous cells, however, would survive her and proliferate wildly in Gey’s lab, “with mythological intensity.” [p. 40] He would freely distribute them to scientists throughout the world who, in turn, would often make amazing medical discoveries. Over time, for-profit cell banks and biotech companies would enter the picture and launch a “multimillion-dollar” industry from a “dime”-sized sample of Henrietta’s cervix.
Meanwhile, Henrietta’s children would struggle financially – some of them unable to afford basic health care – and they would not even learn about their mother’s scientific legacy for decades to come. When first contacted by John Hopkins officials in 1973, they come to understand that the doctors want to test them for cancer, so they willingly comply with blood sampling. As Henrietta’s husband later recounts: “They said they got my wife and she part alive. . . . They been doin experiments on her and they wanted to test my children see if they got that cancer killed their mother.” [p. 182] But, as the family grimly discovers, there’s been an abysmal misunderstanding – in fact, the doctors only wanted the family’s samples in order to conduct further HeLa cell experimentation. This painful revelation arrives as a shock for Deborah who for days had been phoning Hopkins for her “cancer results,” anxiously dreading that she may have inherited her mother’s fatal disease. [p. 185]
The family’s formidable distrust of researchers and doctors only expands when in 1976, reading an article in Rolling Stone magazine, they also learn about massive commercial profiteering from HeLa cells. [p. 193] As Deborah remarks, “. . . if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime.” [p. 9]
A SPECIMEN’S RED TOE NAILS
And yet, above all else, it is the doctors’ casual disregard and thudding incuriosity about the family’s interest in their mother as a person and human being that destroys any last vestige of their trust. When Skloot makes her initial phone contact with Deborah and proposes writing a book about her mother, Deborah eagerly responds that such a book would be “great.” Only one-year old when Henrietta died, Deborah has tired of everyone’s focus on her mother as though she were just some dehumanized assortment of cells. “Everything always about just the cells and don’t even worry about her name and was HeLa even a person.” [p. 52] She asks, “You know what I really want? I want to know, what did my mother smell like? For all my life I just don’t know anything, not even the little common things, like what color she like? Did she like to dance?” [p. 53]
For decades, no researchers inform or consult with the Lacks family about the nature and scope of their experimentation with Henrietta’s cells. Instead, popular media bombard the Lacks siblings with disturbing and weirdly evocative depictions of their mother whose early death left them with few memories of her. Deborah sees “a Newsweek article called PEOPLE-PLANTS that said that scientists had crossed Henrietta Lacks’s cells with tobacco cells” which leads her to fear “they’d created a human plant-monster that was half her mother, half tobacco.” [p. 196] Hearing that scientists had used HeLa cells to study viruses like AIDS and Ebola, Deborah imagines “her mother eternally suffering the symptoms of each disease: bone-crushing pain, bleeding eyes, suffocation.” [p. 196] She is horrified to read that some people have even tried to kill HeLa cells. [p. 196]
Even while Henrietta lay dying a painful and agonizing death in the hospital, doctors write in the medical record: “Henrietta is still a miserable specimen.” [p. 66] Later, during Henrietta’s autopsy, one of Gey’s assistants charged with collecting additional pathology samples gasps when she suddenly notes that “Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish.” [p. 90] Recounting that episode years later, the assistant explains: “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in the bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.” [pp. 90-1]
A STORY MANY-STORIED
This story is many-storied – not only about “HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks, but of Henrietta’s family – particularly Deborah – and their life-long struggle to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible.” [p. 7] Their colossal struggle intimately involves issues of race, gender, poverty, class, and healthcare inequality. It raises substantial questions about medical practice and research ethics, about societal care of the mentally ill, about the moral conduct of journalistic inquiry into other peoples’ lives. It ignites legal and ethical debates about tissue ownership and the commercialization of human biological materials.
When the struggle is fueled by depersonalization and dehumanization of Henrietta Lacks and her family, we also wrestle with great philosophical disturbances; at this level, the book sounds a cautionary note about the valorization of medical and scientific “objectivity.” We see how claims to such objectivity can actually derive from the denial of someone’s subjectivity. How the “progress” of scientific research can depend upon dehumanizing the body and its parts which hauntingly reside as “specimens” within the freezers of commercial biobanks and unregulated storage facilities scattered throughout the country.
But underneath all of this – stripped bare of scientific mind, of political and ideological counsel, of celestial advisement and legal consideration, of professional belonging and identity – I would have to say that the book tells a remarkably simple story infused with a very old theme. In essence, the story is a fiercely human tale about the importance of seeing one another in the clarifying light of each other’s unique and radiant mortal being. We are reminded that this sometimes requires faith and forgiveness, the acute notice of a corpse’s painted toe nails, or a road trip to Crownsville. But, always, it requires a basic respect for persons that calls on us to seek each other out with curiosity and compassion, rejecting utilitarian yardsticks to measure our humanity or the value of others’ lives. There is a moral to the story, and it is fully captured by Elie Wiesel in the book’s epigraph:
Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets,
With its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish,
And with some measure of triumph.”
-------------------------------
Kate Scannell is a physician and the author of the memoir, "Death of the Good Doctor." Her new novel is "Flood Stage."
This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration in the Journal of Legal Medicine (c) 2010 [copyright Taylor & Francis]. The
Journal of Legal Medicine is available online at:
http://www.informaworld.com, and this article is available at the following open URL address:
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=[paper
issn]&volume=31&issue=4&spage=[starting page of article]