The Engineered Death [Spectral Lines

Abstract

This is not only a parable about technology and progress. This is also a true story. When I was a boy, my mother contracted an incurable cancer called Hodgkin’s disease. At a hospital in Manhattan, in New York City, ingenious medical engineers and doctors bombarded her with radiation—at far higher levels, and for far longer, than most experts at that time recommended. Only my father knew of the severity of her illness. My mother kept that from others. I began to grasp the situation when our grandmother came to care for my brother, sister, and me while my mother stayed in the hospital. Through the prism of my 10-year-old mind, I concluded that something terrible had happened for us to endure Grandma’s strange cooking and hot temper. To our family’s delight, our mother’s disease vanished. She remained cancer-free. In time, she could say aloud that in the mid-1960s she was among the first Hodgkin’s patients to be cured in the United States. She could also describe her anxious encounters with the bulky and fearsome radiation equipment that, guided by her innovative doctors, had saved her life.