David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

his heart. Here were one of the top producers in Hollywood, one of the most powerful bankers on Wall Street, and one of the best ...

contemplate. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been ...

miss. At one point, in the midst of his battle, Freireich realized that the standard method of monitoring the children’s cancer— ...

was not wrong. His was the empathetic response. But it is also the response that would never have led to a cure. “We used to do ...

recovered.” When he said the words “grabbing their legs like this,” an involuntary grimace passed across Freireich’s face, as if ...

10. When Jay Freireich was doing his medical training, he met a nurse named Haroldine Cunningham. He asked her out on a date. Sh ...

early 1950s. They have been married ever since. Freireich’s wife is as small as Freireich is enormous, a tiny woman with a deep ...

tried the bathroom door—and couldn’t get in. “My mother had locked the door,” she said. “I got the neighbor from downstairs, who ...

asked me once, weren’t you angry? And I said, no, I wasn’t, I understood her misery. “There are things that either build you up ...

me immediately as a county intern, so they said, ‘We’ll take care of it.’” This was what it was like being a doctor in those day ...

She left us destitute and, as we might, Trooping together. 4 Or, as the English essayist Thomas De Quincey famously put it: “It ...

novelist Peter de Vries died of leukemia. He wrote a heartbreaking novel based on the experience called The Blood of the Lamb. D ...

Methotrexate pumped into his skull, or, more accurately, was watching a group of mechanics gathered solemnly around the stalled ...

vitals where the demon variously dwelt, what did they think of these best fruits of ten million hours of dedicated toil? They ho ...

them stand in a small metal closet. What he finds is that the actual experience of the thing that was feared is a lot less scary ...

wouldn’t take. I think he felt that there was nothing to lose.” To Mezan, there was no mystery—in his experience over the years— ...

the usual frame of childhood didn’t exist for them. It was shattered.” 9 The idea of administering repeated bouts of chemotherap ...

the atmosphere was like,” DeVita says. “I remember there was a grand rounds around that time, to discuss choriocarcinoma. And th ...

housed the ward for adults who had chronic myeloid leukemia. CML is a form of leukemia that overproduces white blood cells. The ...

looking back on that experiment. “Everyone said it was insane. What if the children ended up somehow getting CML as well? What i ...