The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

“We’ve all heard the Horatio Alger–like stories about people who have experienced early hardships and have either overcome or, better yet, been made stronger by them. These tales are embedded in Americans’ cultural DNA. At best, they paint an incomplete picture of what childhood adversity means for the hundreds of millions of people in the United States (and the billions around the world) who have experienced early life stress. More often, they take on moral overtones, provoking feelings of shame and hopelessness in those who struggle with the lifelong impacts of childhood adversity. But there is a huge part of the story missing.”

This passage highlights an important theme in the book—the connection between the past and the present. Part of the work of The Deepest Well is to push back against a powerful myth about American identity; Burke Harris’s early identification of this myth lays the groundwork for her scientific argument later in the text.

“I wonder…What if…It seems like…These questions kept popping up, but part of the problem in putting the pieces together was that they would emerge from situations occurring months or sometimes years apart. Because they didn’t fit logically or neatly into my worldview at those discrete moments in time, it was difficult to see the story behind the story. Later it would feel obvious that all of these questions were simply clues pointing to a deeper truth, but like a soap-opera wife whose husband was stepping out with the nanny, I would understand it only in hindsight.”

Just as Burke Harris pushes back against American cultural idealism, she consistently intervenes in popular representations of science and scientists. Her description of scientific insight as a nonlinear process and the importance of persistent questions allows her to show that science and research can be driven by uncertainty and asking questions rather than by certainty and hard facts.

“There is a widely known parable that students all learn on day one in public-health school, and it happens to be based on a true story. In late August 1854, there was a severe cholera outbreak in London [...]Back then the dominant theory was that diseases like cholera and bubonic plague were spread through unhealthy air. John Snow, a London physician, was skeptical of this “miasma theory” of disease. By canvassing the residents of the Broad Street neighborhood, he was able to deduce the pattern of the disease. Incidences were all clustered around a water source: a public well with a hand pump. When Snow convinced local officials to disable the well by removing the pump’s handle, the outbreak subsided.”

This passage is the source of the work’s title. In addition, Burke Harris’s inclusion of a key episode from the start of epidemiology and public health as medical disciplines allows her to convey important scientific and medical concepts. This quote is a typical effort by Burke Harris to make science and medicine comprehensible by using stories from scientific history.