There’s a certain passage that can be believed that anyone could connect with. Whether they had strict parents or easy going parents. The way you were raised doesn’t stop you from a child’s nature to wander and explore, and eventually, fall down and scrape a knee. The passage that Elizabeth Spelman wrote about a body repairing itself is something that really sticks out, it could be found on page 33 in Repair but who really wants to pull out a book for a single passage? Spelman wrote the following:
There is first of all the repair of the human body. The human body has an awesome capacity to repair itself in ways that are to the ordinary observer both visible (e.g., the healing of a cut) and invisible (e.g., the continual self-repair of DNA, or the recently discovered capacity of the human heart to repair itself.
In a way, you could say that Spelman is connecting our bodies to how she views Willie from previous chapters. Our bodies could be thought of as bricoleurs. They repair even the slightest abnormality with what it has available or what it routinely gets.
The passage could also connect with various other stories, fiction or non-fiction, however, one that sticks out to me is The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. It starts off with a seventeen year old girl who is in a coma, and she soon wakes after a year. That alone connects with how the body works to repair damage within itself, invisible to the mere human eye.
Later within the story, she winds up getting scrapes and various other injuries just to find herself being healed, much faster than typically found in humans, but having her body mend her nonetheless.
It’s also found that she was in a coma due to a near-death experience and she’s not truly in her own body anymore. Her parents were scientists and were able to create a body that could sustain a human brain and function as a human normally would and no one except her family knew; she didn’t even know herself until roughly halfway through the story. However, injuries are bound to happen and a body has to do what a body has to do. In this case, again, repairing the injuries inflicted on this not-so-normal normal girl.
Of course, if you’re asked to think of a story where someone gets injured, you could possibly think of five or more books right off the top of your head. Some could be general fiction stories with fights between characters or they could be non-fiction stories about what it was like to be a soldier in a war. But both have a common piece. Injuries being healed with little or no help from outside sources and the outside sources are mainly only used in serious conditions like a broken bone or a gunshot severely close to an important organ or artery.
You could even connect it to real life and see the disturbing side of healing. To use a personal example, my aunt was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Cancer happens inside of your body and your body continues to try and fix it. We know this to be true because there has been scientific evidence showing that everyone has cancer within their bodies; whether or not it starts to show could be because of a plethora of reasons. However, my aunt got her own treatment specified for her cancer, she went through surgery and she is now in remission.
Some people are not as lucky and this is where the disturbing aspect comes in. Some people, despite going through similar treatments as my aunt, don’t make it to live any longer. Their cancer is what brought them down. They had a limitation in abilities and were no longer able to push down the limitations in their way and go on to find even more to pass.