By Dave Andrusko
For the last story of the day, I’d like to very briefly talk about a column written by one of my favorite writers and then add the link.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter, and television and radio host of “Faith & Culture” on EWTN. I most often encounter her work by reading her columns from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She is as eloquent as she is indignant in denouncing ugly behavior.
The title of her latest piece is “Don’t Call Them Vegetables.”
(www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/colleen-carroll-campbell/colleen-carroll-campbell-don-t-call-them-vegetables/article_71df4bcd-a11c-5141-8094-9b9197e443c8.html) She is referring, of course, to the ugly designation “persistent vegetative state,” or PVS.
The irony is that the neurologist and neurosurgeon who coined the term were “searching for a jargon-free term to classify severely brain-damaged patients whom they considered awake but unaware,” Campbell writes. While they have both died, the term “has taken on a life of its own.”
I want you to read the column, so let me say just one more thing. Not only is the term intrinsically dehumanizing, it is often misapplied, as the two studies Campbell references in her piece attest.
But, alas, the label sticks, revelations and debunking notwithstanding. “That perception leaves patients’ families marginalized and mocked for doing what should be recognized as a noble thing,” Campbell writes : “fighting for vulnerable loved ones who, with the right time and treatment, might someday recover their voices and prove the naysayers wrong.”
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