draft "Interlude XII" (Gage and Reimer)

(probably need to edit the phrasing before publishing—wasn't Reimer a botched
circumcision (more like circum-trans-ion if you ask me!—but you did not ask me)
or something rather than cloacal extrophy?—should I mention his twin?)

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+Title: Interlude XII
+Date: 2018-01-01
+Category: fiction
+Tags: interlude
+Status: draft
+
+"I swear, if I read another _word_ about Phineas Gage—and this goes double for David Reimer—I am going to _scream_. Why do science writers always recount the _same_ illustrative case studies? Are they all just plagiarizing each other out of laziness, or could it really be that in the vast history of human inquiry, we've learned nothing more than can be gleaned from the same half-dozen anecdotes?"
+
+"Um. Illustrative case studies are hard to come by. It's _rare_ for an accident to take out exactly the parts of the brain to leave the patient alive and yet demonstrate the functionality of some key brain area—or for boys with cloacal exstophy to be raised as girls. It's not like we could deliberately invent such horrors to inflict on human subjects, just to find out what would happen."
+
+"It's not?"
+
+"Well, it would be unthinkably unethi—I don't like that look on your face."