ABSTRACT
The relationship between health, illness, self, and community was first suggested to me in 1981, when I was a third-year medical student, working on the pediatric ward of Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. One night we admitted a four-year-old Amish child who lived in one of the many Amish communities east and south of Cleveland. The little boy had a very fast-growing tumor in his abdomen, and a surgeon at a community hospital, thinking the child’s pain was caused by appendicitis, had operated. He found a mass that turned out to be a Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and was presented with a dilemma: by the time the surgical wound had healed the tumor was likely to be widely spread. Desperate for a solution, the surgeon sent the child to Rainbow, one of the best children’s hospitals in the country, to see if anything could be done.
