The Dead Baby Mystery Case Analysis

From the essay, The Dead Baby Mystery, Gawade starts with a court case that involves the murders of eight children of Marie Noe that no one could explain what happened. As Gawande writes, “some of the most respected pathologists of the time, could find no explanation for the crib deaths” (202) and “Foul play was strongly considered, but no evidence for was found” (202). What Gawande has written is that at the time, cases like these, child murder or accident, determines not easily. Even three decades later — the case reopened and the judge charges her of child abuse — one of the officials that wrote back to Gawande stating “that there was no direct evidence to support the charges” (Gawande 204). That quote Gawande wrote to show that the charge came from indirect or circumstantial evidence. With what has happened to Noe and the children, Gawande postulates that charging people in the child abuse case is difficult to do

Gawande, being a married person and a doctor, writes that the results the cause of child abuse is determined by social profiling, the very thing that Gawande want to avoid as a doctor and others when looking at the injury for abuse. With the statistics that Gawande writes, “single parents have almost double the risk of being abusive [and], poor families, almost sixteen times the likelihood” (206). That statistic case has him to profile people based on the abuse and if they are in those statistics, they would be more likely to be scrutinized, otherwise less likely if not of the case. When Gawande analyzed the case of Mario Noe, she had social traits that had surpassed the scrutiny of the statistics. He writes about her saying “She was married, middle-class, and respectable” (206), and Gawande reason that it is why she had the upper hand in the case of getting out of the thought that she is a child