From 378659d695858bcd910cc52eae9257bb557b38e9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2017 20:33:56 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] throw the pun (and some more verisimilitude) into "Interlude XII" draft I couldn't resist. I physically could not. --- content/drafts/interlude-xii.md | 6 +++++- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/interlude-xii.md b/content/drafts/interlude-xii.md index 4a3a20c..be77377 100644 --- a/content/drafts/interlude-xii.md +++ b/content/drafts/interlude-xii.md @@ -6,7 +6,11 @@ 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." +"Um. Illustrative case studies are hard to come by. It takes some incredibly rare coincidences for an accident to take out exactly enough of the brain to leave the patient alive but with deficits demonstrating the functionality of the frontal lobe, or for a boy _with an identical twin brother_ to be raised as girl after a botched circumcision—" + +"More like circum-_trans_-ion if you ask me!" + +"_I didn't_. Anyway, 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?" -- 2.17.1