Book
Cystic Fibrosis patients turn to experimental phage therapy
Frank Buckley interviews author and publicist Diane Shader Smith, who’s daughter, Mallory, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and authored the posthumously published book “Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life.”
Column: A memoir unlike any you've read: A young woman's inspiring struggle with her invisible killer
Mallory Smith was a toddler in 1995 when doctors finally diagnosed her persistent cough and runny nose: cystic fibrosis. Life expectancy with the disease at the time was between 25 and 30 years.
The Value of the Patient Voice: A Review of Salt in My Soul
Mallory Smith’s posthumously published book, Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life, is an insightful and moving account of one young woman’s experience living with a chronic, often invisible, illness. Much of what Mallory included in her journal was too difficult for her to share with family and friends while she was alive, yet she hoped that her writing would one day “offer insight for people living with, or loving someone with, chronic illness.”
My daughter is gone but her legacy lives through her writing and phage therapy
“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
That line from the musical “Hamilton” inspires me to keep telling the story of my daughter Mallory. She died two years ago Friday at the age of 25, two months after receiving a transplant to replace both of her lungs, which had been ravaged by cystic fibrosis and an infection that no drugs could eradicate.
Read an excerpt from a memoir of a young woman who died of a superbug infection
Salt had always been a fundamental part of Mallory Smith’s life. Like all babies born with cystic fibrosis, Mallory had inherited two defective copies of a gene responsible for balancing the salt and water in sweat. The disease caused a thick mucus to form in her lungs, trapping bacteria and triggering infections, and leaving her skin a little salty.
Panel decries lack of attention for Antimicrobial Resistance
Frank Buckley interviews author and publicist Diane Shader Smith, who’s daughter, Mallory, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and authored the posthumously published book “Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life.”
The impact of antibiotic resistance: sharing stories to advance needed legislation
The compelling story of Mallory Smith, who lived with cystic fibrosis for 25 years and died in 2017 after a 10-year battle with antibiotic-resistant infections, set the stage for a discussion on Capitol Hill on May 18 about the growing impact of resistance, the broken economic model for antibiotic development, the need to use antibiotics wisely and how legislation like the PASTEUR Act can help.
Diane Shader Smith shares lessons from her daughter Mallory's unfinished life
“If medicine is in the business of improving our health–human health, we ought to know what makes us humans,” says Dien Ho, PhD, associate professor of Philosophy and Healthcare Ethics. He’s speaking about the MCPHS Center for Health Humanities’ ongoing series of lectures delivered by artists and writers exploring the patient condition.
Book review: Salt In My Soul
Salt in My Soul is not an easy book. Like every story of a life authentically lived, it is an alternation of joy and sorrow, expectation, and despair. It is, to borrow the title of another bestseller of years past, a book about the audacity of hope. How can one hope in the face of an inevitably terminal illness?