The Science of the Good Samaritan, Dr. Emily Smith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Books, 2023.
Summary: A book that looks at what it means to love our neighbor through the lens of global public health.
I first encountered Dr. Emily Smith through posts on Facebook under the title of “The Friendly Neighborhood Epidemiologist” (which later migrated to Substack). This was during the Covid epidemic when many of us were searching for accurate and understandable information and perspective to get us through a time when bodies were being stored in refrigerated trailers in our major cities. As an epidemiologist, Dr. Smith gave us daily doses of good information about infection rates, measures for staying healthy, what to do if we got sick, and how to protect our vulnerable loved ones.
But more than that, as the political divisions arose, she rose above them and helped us to think as Christians rather than partisans about how we might live and love through this horror. A recurring theme was what neighbor love meant and could be practically expressed. She drew on her training as an epidemiologist, knowing how airborne viruses spread, and helped us think about decisions about masking, family gatherings, and in-person worship. She wrote as both a scientist and as the wife of a pastor, and for me, brought those two worlds together seamlessly. Sadly, like so many, especially women, in public health, she paid with death threats to herself and her family as others tried prevent her from rising above partisan politics by asking what it meant to love our neighbors, like the good Samaritan.
In this book she continues to explore that question. It is not a re-hash of her Covid experience although she does reference it at points. Rather she asks the question of what it means to be a modern day Good Samaritan. Principally, it means a concern for others beyond our own groups. She explores what it means to care about those who experience greater mortality rates simply because of their race or national origin. She describes how the calibration of devices as simple as pulse oximeters ignored differences of race, giving false readings for people of color. She describes the care she received for preeclampsia during a pregnancy, treatment unavailable to many women in the world who die without it.
Along the way she introduces to neighbors who model that concern, like Edna Adan Ismail, Somalia’s first midwife, a WHO official who used her retirement income to buid a hospital in war-torn Somaliland amid the communal dump because that was the only land given her. It was a hospital among the most marginalized. She describes the work of Dr. Paul Farmer, who identified a child needing surgery as the key factor in many parts of the world that submerges families below the poverty line. She shows the cost effectiveness of investing in child surgery and describes her own work with a team of Tanzanians to remove barriers for children with cancer to receive treatment. This is what happens when people refuse to walk by but stop and care.
This lens motivates her to address issues evangelicals (of which she is one) want to remain silent about. Runaway capitalism results in wide income disparities placing much of the world at risk due to lack of access to affordable health care, Climate change expands the range of vector-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever, and Zika. She raises the challenging issue of equity in health care–that if we truly notice the person on the side of the road and are to be neighbor to them, it means directing more resources to the least-served. In Paul Farmer’s words this means the five S’s of staff, stuff, space, social support, and systems (as in good referral systems).
A side story of this book is her journey as a woman in science. Her life reflects the importance of door openers like the university prof who worked with her and invited her into her lab as a high school student, and of models and mentors, like her research mentor Dr. Henry Rice, an ongoing collaborator who invited her to give testimony at the United Nations.
Dr. Smith’s passion for her work is evident but also friendly and vulnerable. In her book, she invites us to pull up a seat as it were, at her table, to talk. I also discovered that she is a changed person from the person I encountered online during Covid. She talks honestly about the year-and-a-half struggle with migraines where she lived in darkened rooms. She learned to “untether,’ to go slower, and to know that she was loved by the One who also suffered.
I reflected as I read on the parallels between Dr. Emily Smith and Dr. Katherine Hayhoe. both Christian women in science bringing faith and scholarship together around the existential issues of the day, climate and public health. Both have husbands who are pastors. Both have winsomely pushed against evangelical resistance to their work in science. Both are posing the very questions Jesus posed in answering the question of “who is the neighbor I’m required to love?” Who is it, lying at the side of the road, in our world? What is the care they need? And who will be the Good Samaritan?
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.
