When Love is Love

In 1991, in the tiny town of New Berlin, in upstate New York, a young physician named Bill Thomas performed an experiment. He didn’t really know what he was doing. He was thirty-one years old, less than two years out of family medicine residency, and he had just taken a new job as medical director of Chase Memorial Nursing Home, a facility with eighty severely disabled elderly residents. About half of them were physically disabled; four out of five had Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of cognitive disability. Up until then Thomas had worked as an emergency physician at a nearby hospital, the near opposite of a nursing home. People arrived in the emergency room with discrete, reparable problems—a broken leg, say, or a cranberry up the nose. If a patient had larger, underlying issues—if, for instance, the broken leg had been caused by dementia—his job was to ignore the issues or send the person somewhere else to deal with them, such as a nursing home. He took this new medical director ...

Reese Russell, a tall, slender, fun-loving, and handsome young man with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, was thirty-four years old when the United States entered World War I in April 1917. He came from the little Appalachian mill town of Cedar Bluff in Tazewell County, Virginia, a place of quiet mountain charm where community picnics, summer bandstand concerts, and church revival meetings were the order of the day. He and most of his friends had never been more than twenty miles from home. Why travel, people joked, when they already lived in the most beautiful place on earth?  Russell registered for the draft in the summer of 1917, and the U.S. Army called his number soon afterward. Putting down his banjo and straw hat, he kissed his girl good-bye and joined the 317th Infantry Regiment of the 80th “Blue Ridge” Infantry Division, a unit made up of draftees from rural Virginia, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania.  He went to France and fought in the Battle of the Meuse-A...

This is from Carl Rogers' Book On Becoming A Person . Some, but not those on experience, have also become significant to me, who as a person, wants to understand better why we as behave as we do. There, in very brief outline, are some of the externals of my professional life. But I would like to take you inside, to tell you some of the things I have learned from the thousands of hours I have spent working intimately with individuals in personal distress. I would like to make it very plain that these are learnings which have significance for me. I do not know whether they would hold true for you. I have no desire to present them as a guide for anyone else. Yet I have found that when another person has been willing to tell me something of his inner directions this has been of value to me, if only in sharpening my realization that my directions are different. So it is in that spirit that I offer the learnings which follow.  In each case I believe they became a part of my actions and i...