ABSTRACT
When the well-known science writer and Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould was told in 1982 at the age of forty that he was suffering from abdominal mesothelioma, an “invariably fatal” form of stomach cancer, he was as unsure as any of us would be about where to turn for consolation. He was fortunate enough, however, to have his faith. In his case, it was a faith in knowledge, more specifically a faith in the knowledge of numbers and statistics. In his book Full House, which is one of the rare occasions on which he has written about this illness, he makes clear the immediate and lasting consolation he found in learning what was known of the disease. What saved his spirit, oddly enough, was the discovery at his neighborhood university library that this abdominal cancer had a “median mortality” of eight months.1
