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CLINT* HENRY T. RICKETTSÎ He wakes at dawn. He is thirty-nine years old. He feels of his right hand, testing the strength of its grip, the opening and closing of the fingers. Lying there, sleep gone, unwilling but compelled, he thinks back to the little black mole that was widely cut from his skin 5 years ago. It would surely not return. It has not—there. But he dwells now, helpless to refrain, more vividly, on the day, a month ago, when surgeons pulled a dark, menacing chunk from the depths of his lung because he had been coughing blood. He knows the meaning of that chunk, that swollen child of a pigmy parent. He tests his hand again. It had told him last Sunday that a black grandchild had found its way to his brain. That brain is soon to sustain massive doses of irradiation. What will be left? He is a psychiatrist. He rises and dresses, slowly, with disobedient digits, and goes out, a smile of gentle irony on his lips, to help those who will live longer than he. ?Clint died of melanoma on March 10, 1973. !Department of Medicine, University of Chicago. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1974 | 209 ...

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