longer.blue

"At seven this cold snowy night, Joan, in the arms of her gaunt-faced father, in a car driven by her uncle, started out through the whirling snow one hundred and seventy miles to Ann Arbor. Her father said Joan seemed so happy to be going on this auto ride except when those sudden pains made her scream. Then, when the pains eased, she looked up at her father and smiled. In Battle Creek Joan screamed for the last time. She stayed quiet for a long time and her father took her in his arms out in the snow in front of the headlights. She opened her eyes and looked up at her Daddy and gave him what was her last big smile. It was one thirty in the morning now and very cold and, there now being no need of a transfusion of the blood that could have been got for free at the University, they started back to Grand Haven in the snow. Stirred up with Joan's needless death -- it was only one of thousands -- I wrote to Boss Kettering describing it. I wrote to him and told him how such infamies in our land of enormous wealth, in a country with unlimited requisites for good living, how this poverty causing the death of children like Joan, nauseated me. It made me sick at my stomach to go on telling about life-saving science. Couldn't there be a science against poverty? Mr. Kettering wrote me back kindly. He told me not to be impatient. He said that millions of children had been dying for thousands of years and we couldn't save them all at once, right now. As for my nausea, he prescribed a dose of bicarbonate of soda. --Paul de Kruif, "The Sweeping Wind"