David and Goliath

David and Goliath

by

Malcolm Gladwell

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on David and Goliath makes teaching easy.

David and Goliath: Chapter 5: Emil “Jay” Freireich Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Emil “Jay” Freireich is the son of Hungarian immigrants who lived in Chicago in the 1920s and 30s. When Jay was a young boy, his father committed suicide. This was shortly after the stock market crash of 1929, when the family lost everything. In the aftermath of his father’s death, Freireich’s mother worked in sweatshops, leaving him with a nanny whom he came to see as his real mother. They were devastatingly poor and only able to eat protein once a week. At one point, Freireich’s mother married and older Hungarian man, but Freireich hated him and came to resent his mother because she fired his nanny, the only person to whom he was close. By the time Gladwell interviews him, Freireich is 84, but he has an impeccable memory. All the same, he can’t remember his nanny’s name because he has blocked out the painful memories of that period.  
In this section, Gladwell turns his attention to a different kind of hardship: rather than examining dyslexia, he considers whether or not extreme poverty and a lack of stable parental support can become “desirable difficulties.” The fact that Freireich has blocked out the majority of his childhood memories suggests that his upbringing was quite traumatic, thereby underlining how difficult it must have been to triumph over it—if, indeed, that is what he has managed to do.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Switching tracks, Gladwell describes the British government’s concerns during World War II. The government feared what would happen to London if German forces bombed it, since the city was largely defenseless. There were predictions that 1.2 million people would get wounded and that nearly the entire population would flee to the countryside. For this reason, psychiatric centers were built just outside the city, as the government anticipated the need to calm mass hysteria. Then, in 1940, the Germans actually bombed London, and though 40,000 people were killed and 60,000 were wounded, none of the government’s predictions about the citizens’ reactions came true. Rather than descending into panic, Londoners remained relatively calm. In fact, the vast majority of the citizens showed a sense of “indifference,” and though many people attribute this toughness to the stereotypically British “stiff upper lip,” Gladwell argues that the city’s reaction says more about adversity than temperament.
It makes sense that the British government feared the way Londoners would respond to German bombardments, considering that the city is so densely populated. What’s more, bombings are very traumatic events, so it’s natural to assume that any city facing such violence would descend into chaos. That London managed to maintain its composure, though, indicates that these assumptions are inaccurate. And though Gladwell hasn’t yet revealed how, exactly, the people of London were able to stay so calm, it’s clear that he wants to use this story to underline the notion that even the worst threats—the most harrowing forms of adversity—aren’t always as debilitating as people tend to think. 
Themes
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
To make his point, Gladwell references the work of J. T. MacCurdy, a psychiatrist studying morale. MacCurdy divided the London bombing victims into three categories: the directly impacted, the “near misses,” and the “remote misses.” The people who were directly impacted were the ones the bomb killed. The “near misses” were the people close to the explosion who were perhaps injured (or, at the very least, shaken) by the experience. Finally, the “remote misses” were the people who felt the explosion but weren’t close enough to be in true danger. After reading diary entries and speaking with a number of remote misses, MacCurdy learned that people who survived the bombings ended up feeling somewhat invincible. One woman even wrote in her diary that, after hunkering down and feeling the earth shake, she felt “pure and flawless happiness,” and she was elated and refreshed by the experience.
To become a “remote miss,” Gladwell implies, is to gain a new perspective on life. The woman who survived a nearby bombing without sustaining any injuries felt a happiness that was previously unknown to her. Others felt indestructible. Needless to say, then, the bombing has an opposite effect on people than what was expected—rather than demoralizing them and plunging them into fear, it emboldens them. In the context of Gladwell’s overall argument, this supports the idea that hardship leads to resilience, implying that not all forms of adversity (and, thus, not all disadvantages) have completely negative outcomes.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Gladwell argues that the reason London as a whole didn’t descend into chaos during the German bombing (which took place on a nightly basis for eight months) is that the bombardment simply created a large number of “remote misses,” thereby emboldening the vast majority of the citizens instead of demoralizing them. This demonstrates that traumatic events impact people in different ways. In other words, one experience can destroy a person’s life while emboldening and strengthening somebody else. Similarly, dyslexia can make a person’s life too difficult, since not everyone has the ability or resources to overcome the challenges the disorder presents. At the same time, though, it can also push people to do things they might not otherwise have done, thereby leading to their success. Accordingly, Gladwell believes people ought not to make the assumption that there’s only one way to respond to hardship.
Gladwell’s overall point about hardship leading to resilience is important to understand, but it’s also worth paying attention to the fact that adversity doesn’t always have positive outcomes. There are, for instance, many people who fight against dyslexia for their entire lives without ever benefitting from their struggle, just like there were 100,000 people in London who were either killed or wounded during the German bombardment. As David and Goliath progresses, readers should keep this in mind, lest it seem like Gladwell thinks tragic afflictions and terrible situations are always beneficial.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Quotes
Get the entire David and Goliath LitChart as a printable PDF.
David and Goliath PDF
When Jay Freireich was a child, he came down with tonsillitis. The doctor who removed Freireich’s tonsils became his hero, and from then on he dreamed of becoming a physician himself. In high school, Freireich’s physics teacher encouraged him to pursue a college education, so his mother borrowed money from a woman in the Hungarian immigrant community to pay for tuition. In this way, Freireich became a doctor and his larger-than-life personality made him stand out among his colleagues. When talking about Freireich, Gladwell says, most of his colleagues tell stories about his temper, though they all have great admiration for him. In one conversation, Freireich complains to Gladwell about the idea of hospice care, arguing that doctors should never simply give up and allow patients to die. To illustrate his point, he says he’s never been depressed or hopeless as a doctor, even when working on the hardest cases of his career.
Freireich’s optimism is somewhat rare, even in the medical community. Indeed, most doctors undoubtedly experience moments of sadness while working on hopeless cases—this is simply the nature of working in such a challenging field. Freireich, however, is unperturbed by such things because of his difficult childhood. Gladwell’s argument, it seems, is that Freireich’s experiences as a child facing poverty and the loss of a parent fundamentally impacted the way he sees the entire world, turning him into the kind of person who never despairs in moments of hardship.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
Gladwell admits that most people want their doctors to empathize with them. Freireich, however, isn’t interested in doing this. Instead, he’s interested in doing what he can to save his patients, even if that means forgoing emotional pleasantries. Considering the effect Freireich’s upbringing had on his adult personality and success as a doctor, Gladwell acknowledges that nobody would wish “a childhood like Freireich’s on anyone,” since it seems like there’s nothing to benefit from such a difficult life. And yet, he also indicates that this assumption might not be all that accurate. The question becomes, then, whether or not a difficult childhood can function like a “remote miss” instead of a “direct hit.”
The notion that Freireich’s difficult upbringing is a “remote miss” suggests that the hardships he faced as a child didn’t debilitate him for life. Instead, Gladwell intimates, the emotional turmoil of his childhood simply made him stronger, rendering him extraordinarily capable of working against adversity without succumbing to hopelessness. According to Gladwell, Freireich is like somebody who has survived a bombing and emerged with a new, more resilient perspective on life.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
To answer this question about the possible benefits of childhood adversity, Gladwell references a psychological analysis from the 1960s, when a psychologist studying creative and innovative people noticed that an inordinate amount of successful individuals had lost one of their parents at a young age. In keeping with this, a historian studying England’s prime ministers discovered the same phenomenon. What’s more, 12 of the first 44 presidents of the United States lost their fathers when they were children or adolescents. Gladwell notes that there’s also evidence to suggest that, while “gifted children” often fall short of greatness when they’ve benefitted from healthy, happy childhoods, many geniuses emerge from hardship. This, in turn, indicates that it is, in fact, possible for childhood hardship to function like a “remote miss” instead of a direct hit.
Again, Gladwell makes the case that adversity can have unexpected benefits. This time, he considers people who lost a parent at an early age, asserting that this might have contributed to their eventual success. Overall, though, what’s important to take away from Gladwell’s point is that people often ignore the fact that positive outcomes can come from terrible circumstances. By presenting this information about difficult childhoods leading to greatness, Gladwell reminds readers that society’s view of disadvantages isn’t as accurate as it might seem.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
As a young man in 1955, Freireich is assigned to work in the children’s leukemia ward of the National Cancer Institute. His superior, Gordon Zubrod, gives him this responsibility knowing it’s a very bleak posting. At this point in time, childhood leukemia is one of the most difficult illnesses to treat, since it comes on suddenly and leads to great agony. Worst of all, leukemia makes people bleed, meaning that the children in the leukemia ward start bleeding from seemingly every part of their bodies, including the pores of their skin. The ostensible goal of Freireich’s posting is to find a cure for childhood leukemia, but this is a nearly impossible task because he also has to focus on the immediate chaos of keeping children from bleeding to death—not to mention cleaning the floors of blood and trying to get the patients to eat.
Gladwell has already outlined the ways in which Freireich himself has gone through trauma and hardship. Now, as an adult, he faces a new challenge, one that most people would find harrowingly difficult and hopeless. Because of his personal history and overall attitude toward adversity, though, it’s unlikely that he’ll let his job on the children’s leukemia ward demoralize him, at least according to Gladwell’s belief that hardship can lead to resilience.
Themes
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Doctors working on the children’s leukemia ward don’t last long. Freireich, however, is capable of forging onward, proving that what he said about never getting depressed about a patient’s situation is indeed true. Instead of giving up hope, he joins forces with another researcher named Tom Frei, and together they hypothesize that one of the major problems posed by leukemia is that the children aren’t producing enough platelets (“irregularly shaped cell fragments that float around in human blood”), which means their blood won’t clot. Freireich and Frei’s bosses are hesitant to go along with this idea, but the two researchers remain undeterred, determining to give the children multiple blood infusions to help them build up their platelet counts. However, the blood banks won’t give them blood. “You’re gonna kill people!” Freireich yells, prompting one of his colleagues to warn him against saying such things—but he doesn’t care.
Freireich is relatively unbothered by how hopeless and heartbreaking his job can be, but he’s also fiercely committed to the challenge of finding a cure for childhood leukemia. To that end, he isn’t afraid to think outside the box, clearly recognizing that nothing else is working. If every other approach has failed, he reasons, why not turn away from convention? This is why he and Frei decide to give the children blood infusions, and when his colleagues express their hesitations, he chastises them, perfectly willing to enrage them in his attempt to find a cure. In turn, Freireich demonstrates the same kind of “disagreeability” that Gladwell suggests is an important quality for any innovator to possess.
Themes
Convention and the Status Quo Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
Instead of using blood from the National Cancer Institute’s blood bank, Freireich recruits donors. He also innovates the process of transforming the infusions themselves, since platelets stick to steel needles: he uses silicon needles and plastic bags. People think Freireich is crazy to give children so much blood at once, since a miscalculation could kill them. And though one of Freireich’s bosses threatens to fire him if he doesn’t stop, he continues anyway. As a result, the children stop bleeding.
Once more, readers see the benefits of Freireich’s “disagreeability” as he defies his boss’s orders and, in doing so, manages to stop his patients’ bleeding. If he’d cared about what his superiors thought, he would never have found a way to stop the bleeding—a fact that underscores how important it is for some people to remain true to their convictions even in the face of criticism. However, it’s also worth noting that although Gladwell uses Freireich as an example of how childhood hardship can turn people into high-achieving adults, this analysis is somewhat imperfect. After all, Freireich’s disregard for authority has more to do with his conviction and motivation to save lives than with the fact that he faced adversity as a child. At the same time, though, it’s true that his childhood experiences helped him learn to avoid hopelessness, which ultimately enables him to push on with his efforts despite the fact that everyone tells him he’ll fail.
Themes
Convention and the Status Quo Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
Gladwell considers what it takes for someone to act with courage, determining that “courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.” To further illustrate this point, he tells the story of Fred Shuttlesworth, a black preacher and activist in Birmingham, Alabama who survived multiple acts of violence during the civil rights movement. In 1956, the Ku Klux Klan tried to stop Shuttlesworth from executing his plan to ride the city’s segregated buses. To do this, they bombed his house the night before the protest, but when police officers and community members saw his smoldering, ruined house, he walked out of the wreckage unharmed. The incident, Gladwell argues, made him even less afraid of going through with his original plan. The following day, he rode the segregated buses. 
Fred Shuttlesworth is yet another example of a person who is emboldened by a bad experience. When he emerges unharmed from his bombed-out house, he gains the kind of strength that comes from being a “remote miss.” Like the people in London who survived the German bombardment, Shuttlesworth doesn’t let the threat of violence inhibit his overall outlook on life. Rather, he goes through with his plan to ride Birmingham’s segregated buses, feeling even more empowered than he did before the Ku Klux Klan tried to kill him.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
Several months after the close call at his home, Fred Shuttlesworth takes his daughter to enroll at an all-white high school. When he drives up to the school, an angry mob of white men surrounds the vehicle, but he still gets out. The men break his car windows and beat him, but he’s able to get back in the car and drive away without sustaining life-threatening injuries. Shortly thereafter, Shuttlesworth brings a friend to a local church to meet Martin Luther King, Jr., and when they arrive, there’s yet another angry mob of white men. Nevertheless, Shuttlesworth calmly gets out and walks through the crowd, safely ushering his guest into the church. In this way, Gladwell suggests, Shuttlesworth is only emboldened by each of the violent encounters he survives. 
The more racists try to intimidate Fred Shuttlesworth with violence, the more committed he becomes to the civil rights movement. This is because surviving hardship can lead to resilience and renewed courage. By continuing to harass and threaten him, Shuttlesworth’s enemies only make him stronger and less afraid, proving that even the most frightening kinds of adversity often fail to deter people who are morally committed to a cause or belief. 
Themes
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
Gladwell returns to Freireich’s attempt to cure childhood leukemia. By finding a way to stop children from bleeding to death, Freireich manages to keep them alive long enough to focus on what, exactly, is causing the illness in the first place. He knows of several drugs that effectively attack leukemia, but each drug has toxic side effects that threaten patients’ lives in large doses. Instead of letting this discourage him, though, Freireich decides (along with Frei and another colleague) to continue studying the drugs, eventually realizing that they could administer a “cocktail” of medications, since they all have different side effects. This means each drug can still be administered in small amounts without negatively affecting the patients. The combination of drugs also mounts a multi-tiered attack on the illness, not allowing it to regenerate since, when a reasonable amount of one drug stops working, another kicks in. 
Once again, it’s clear that Freireich’s tireless attitude—which Gladwell argues is the result of his difficult childhood—enables him to maintain hope in his attempt to cure childhood leukemia. However, hope isn’t the only thing he needs in order to succeed; he also needs to think outside the box, since nothing anyone else has tried in the past has worked to cure leukemia. By challenging convention, then, he comes up with the bold idea to use multiple drugs at once. In this regard, he shares the same kind of innovation as someone like Ranadivé or Kamprad, both of whom had no problem straying from tradition in order to succeed.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Convention and the Status Quo Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
Freireich’s colleagues and superiors are skeptical of his idea to treat leukemia with so many dangerous drugs, since some of these medications are capable of paralyzing children, causing depression, and generally wreaking havoc on the body. Most people refuse to get on board, but Freireich and Frei’s boss, Zubrod, finally gives them the green light. Still, Freireich’s colleagues refuse to help him conduct the trial, so he has to do everything himself: prepare the drugs, inject them, monitor the patients’ blood, and test their marrow. In the first of 13 cases approved for study, Freireich gives a little girl a dose that is too high, and though she recovers, she later dies. But Freireich doesn’t give up, and the approach begins to work on other patients.
Again, Freireich proves his unwillingness to back down. Even though seemingly everyone in the medical community disapproves of what he’s doing, he forges onward because he genuinely believes he can make a difference. Of course, it’s also worth noting that his patients are in dire circumstances to begin with, meaning that they have little to lose. This enables Freireich to keep trying until he finds something that works, and though experimenting like this on children might seem cruel, Freireich isn’t interested in empathy—he’s interested in results. Consequently, the downsides of treating desperate patients become, in an odd way, advantages.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Convention and the Status Quo Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
Freireich and Frei’s idea to treat leukemia with a “cocktail” of drugs works, but not entirely. After a while, the leukemia comes back, so Freireich decides it’s necessary to administer the concoction of medication every month for an entire year. This is a hard thing to convince people of, since many of the children in remission seem perfectly fine until their leukemia returns. For this reason, parents and doctors alike think Freireich is crazy for wanting to make these children’s lives miserable by giving them toxic drugs on such a regular basis. But he doesn’t care what other people think. He continues as planned, and the multiple rounds of treatment work. Freireich is able to do this, Gladwell argues, because he has “been through worse.” And because of this, there is now a 90 percent cure rate for this kind of childhood leukemia. 
Against all odds, Freireich manages to find a method of treating childhood leukemia that leads to a very successful cure. This, however, requires going against the entire medical community, working on the most depressing cases, and casting aside all emotion in favor of making progress. Among the only kinds of people who can do this, Gladwell believes, are those who have—like Freireich—been through enough hardship that various setbacks and criticisms don’t interfere with their ability to keep working.
Themes
Advantages and Disadvantages Theme Icon
Convention and the Status Quo Theme Icon
Hardship and Resilience Theme Icon
Conviction, Morality, and Empathy Theme Icon
Quotes