Faculty Bibliography

When she gets her chance to talk to the Reagans, Glaser is aware of her special position, her special credentials. 'Because I came from a world the Reagans had been part of, I knew it was probably easier for Nancy Reagan to relate to me than to some other women with AIDS. So I had spoken candidly to her about sex and intimacy, not something I would normally do with someone I don't know well.' But though the Reagans seemed deeply moved by her story, none of the changes for which she hoped came to pass, and Glaser's political activism deepened. She became one of the founders of the pediatric AIDS Foundation, prepared now not just to ask the government for research money, but to raise and distribute it herself. BUT EVEN as she is drawn further and further into a job she never dreamed she would do, Glaser returns her story to the job she had originally set out to do, the job of taking care of her daughter Ariel. As Ariel becomes sicker, as the first-line drugs fail her, Glaser's writing takes on the terrible hard-earned medical knowledgeability of a parent gleaning a medical education from a child's illness. She goes after each new experimental drug, each new possible hope. She records moments of respite, moments of joy in small childhood pleasures - 'Ariel was sitting in a chair and munching and crunching her way through a bag of Cheetos. We were all excited. A Cheeto was giving us goose bumps.' Ultimately, the treatments failed and Ariel died. Her younger brother and her mother continue to battle the disease. In telling her story, Glaser tells some other stories as well. In telling the story of her own journey into activism on behalf of pediatric AIDS, she leads the reader into the maze of Washington, D.C., where her political education proceeds apace. The book also offers, though without analysis, much insight into the relationship between show business and politics. When [Elizabeth Glaser] decides she has to speak out for children with AIDS, it does not seem impossible to her that she could reach the then president (himself a former actor) directly. When she and a friend sit down to make lists of people to approach, they list first doctors, then politicians, and then celebrities ('Whom did we know? I had taught Cher's daughter in elementary school. Jane Fonda was approachable because I had volunteered for her husband Tom Hayden. [Paul Michael Glaser] knew plenty of people, and Lucy knew Steven Spielberg . . .'

A woman who is a pediatrician and mother details her experiences with trying to diagnose her child. With a job that involves healing and protecting people and a parent's neurosis, life can be difficult

Perri Klass discusses the fears and heartaches experienced by mothers of babies with AIDS

I think that if I hadn't been nursing I would have taken this needle stick as a warning and learned the appropriate lesson about being more careful. But the images that played over and over in my brain had nothing to do with fears about my own health. What I kept imagining, in melodramatic Technicolor, was that suddenly, instead of nurturing and nourishing my baby girl, I might be poisoning her, infecting her, betraying her. THE BABY, TWO WEEKS out of the nursery, still looks newborn. His mother only found out that she was HIV-positive six months into the pregnancy, and confides now that if she had known sooner she probably would have had an abortion: 'I mean, he didn't ask to be born. It isn't fair to him, really.' But there's reason to hope that he'll escape infection; only about 30 percent of the children born to HIV-infected women acquire the virus in utero. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to determine definitively that a child is not infected until he or she is over a year old, subjecting parents to a difficult limbo of watching and waiting -- and a definite positive may end that waiting at any point. 'There's just one thing,' she says. 'His nails are so long.' Indeed, like many newborns, the baby has nails that have grown past his fingertips, tiny, almost transparent curves. 'I'm afraid to cut them, and in the nursery they told me to just bite them off.' From the doctor's point of view, of course, it's all wrong. She should have been using condoms; unprotected intercourse puts her partners at risk. And it's possible that pregnancy will have an adverse effect on her own health (and shorten the time she has to care for her family) -- and there's at least a 30 percent chance that she'll have a baby who's infected. She repeats: I just know this baby will be O.K. And the doctor answers: I hope you're right.

Perris Klass reviews the book 'Mapping Our Genes: The Genome Project and the Future of Medicine' by Lois Wingerson

'IT was very early Christmas morning, and in the stillness of the dawn, with the soft snow falling on the housetops, a little child was born in the Bird household.' So begins 'The Birds' Christmas Carol,' published in 1887 by Kate Douglas Wiggin, who is best remembered as the author of 'Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.' In the holiday tale about the Birds (the surname of a human family), the child is named Carol because the music of the Christmas service reaches her mother's ears. Thanks to the sentimentality and the neatness of literary construction peculiar to the 19th century, she proves worthy of her birthday and her naming: 'Her cheeks and lips were as red as holly-berries; her hair was for all the world the color of a Christmas candle-flame; her eyes were bright as stars; her laugh like a chime of Christmas-bells, and her tiny hands forever outstretched in giving.' In a certain sense, the images of Christmas we all know best are products of the 19th century. 'The Nutcracker,' with its splendid tree and magical presents; 'A Christmas Carol,' with its turkey ('What, the one as big as me?') and pudding; the poem 'A Visit From St. Nicholas' (' 'Twas the night before Christmas') -- these make up the secular iconography of Christmas. Even now idealized greeting-card views of the holiday are lit by gaslight, by firelight, by candles on the tree. And these stories carry with them, always, the images of happy children, children lavished with gifts and treats, children wide-eyed before the tree, children dazzled by visions of sugarplums or by the Sugarplum Fairy. But 19th-century literary Christmas scenes are also full of children who are less fortunate, children who are poor and hungry, set to serve as objects of charity, children who are sick and even dying, whose narrative function is sometimes to point a moral, sometimes to invoke the holy pathos of suffering innocence, and give a story poignancy and power. The most famous coupling of childhood illness and Christmas takes place, of course, in 'A Christmas Carol.' Tiny Tim enters the story borne on his father's shoulder, home from church in time for Christmas dinner. Anyone who has given any thought to the fate of saintly children in Victorian fiction must tremble for him when his father says, 'He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.' Pitifully weak, nobly good of heart, victim both of the cruel fate that crippled him and of the unfeeling society that keeps his family in poverty, Tiny Tim would seem to have no chance of living through the story. In fact, Dickens makes use of that convention. His readers could remember, after all, the sad fates met by other sweet, gentle, long-suffering children born into Dickens novels to suffer in a harsh world, and eventually to die. By the time 'A Christmas Carol' was published in 1843, Dickens had already created and killed off not only little Dick in 'Oliver Twist' (1838), but also Smike in 'Nicholas Nickleby' (1839) and, most famous of all, Little Nell in 'The Old Curiosity Shop' (1841)

An excerpt from the novel 'Other Women's Children' about a pediatrician and her feelings as she copes with sick and dying children and her own, healthy son is presented

A pediatrician discusses the idea that there isn't enough room in one body for two people with conflicting rights. Fetal rights issues will confront women in an area where they have already lost power and privacy