Ashlea Euler

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“That just the way it is. Some things will never change. That's just the way it is. But don't you believe them.”
― Malorie Blackman, Noughts & Crosses

“But the history of Hopkins Hospital certainly isn’t pristine when it comes to black patients. In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children—most of them from poor black families—to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher didn’t get consent. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit claiming the study violated the boys’ civil rights and breached confidentiality of doctor-patient relationships by releasing results to state and juvenile courts. The study was halted, then resumed a few months later using consent forms. And in the late nineties, two women sued Hopkins, claiming that its researchers had knowingly exposed their children to lead, and hadn’t promptly informed them when blood tests revealed that their children had elevated lead levels—even when one developed lead poisoning. The research was part of a study examining lead abatement methods, and all families involved were black. The researchers had treated several homes to varying degrees, then encouraged landlords to rent those homes to families with children so they could then monitor the children’s lead levels. Initially, the case was dismissed. On appeal, one judge compared the study to Southam’s HeLa injections, the Tuskegee study, and Nazi research, and the case eventually settled out of court. The Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation and concluded that the study’s consent forms “failed to provide an adequate description” of the different levels of lead abatement in the homes.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks