The Medici Effect, With a New Preface and Discussion Guide

CHAPTER nine

Execute Past Your Failures

VIOLENCE AND SCHOOL CURRICULA

IT WAS AROUND THREE O’CLOCK in the morning on a January night in 1978. A young man, not yet in his twenties, had just walked into the emergency room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was tightly pressing a bloodstained shirt against a deep cut above his eye. Deborah Prothrow-Stith was only a third-year medical student at the time, midway through her surgical rotation, and her task this particular night was to practice stitching up patients. While she took care of the man, he told her what had happened. He’d been at a party and some guy he barely knew had offended him. One thing quickly led to another and suddenly they were squaring off amidst a ring of onlookers. ...