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A VICTIM OF GOODWILL 
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She led her own life with [[?]] necessary to HER 
own things + cats that comfort with their intelligent ways and body warmth- vs. loneliness + pain
It was her RIGHT knowing she was dying to die in her home with her pets,
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The Good Samaritans Became Furies Pursuing an Old Lady
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The end, the very end of the Mary Northern story, came May 1 when the 72-year-old woman died in General Hospital, Nashville, Tenn. 

The autopsy says she died of a blood clot. The doctors' report intimates that if she had not resisted treatment, including amputation, she might be alive today. 

But her epitaph says something else. It was written more than 100 years ago by Charles Dickens, who ruefully observed: "It's a remarkable Christian improvement to have made a pursuing Fury out of the Good Samaritan, but it was so in this case and it is a type of many."

Miss Northern spent the last three and a half months of her life pursued by this Fury, harrassed by Benevolence, a victim of Goodwill. 

It was caring people, our public Good Samaritans, who chased her, all the while bewildered, because she didn't want their "help." 

It was social workers who came into her ramshackle, un-heated home in January, genuinely worried about her health. 

It was police who carried her forcibly out of her home to the hospital for treatment. It was doctors who tried to persuade her to amputate her gangrenous feet. Finally, when they all failed, it was the state-the Department of Human Resources-which sued to have her declared "incompetent," in an attempt to save her life, even against her will. 

Perhaps, James Blumstein, the Vanderbilt professor of law, exaggerated when he said: "These people were killing her with kindness." But they did bludgeon her with autonomy, her privacy, her independence, and her legal control over her own body. 

Now, the lady-labeled a "spinster" even in the wire service obituary-leaves us a legacy beyond the ramshackle old house she shared with her cats and her family memories. She leaves a reminder of how often individuals, especially the weak, the sick, the elderly and the dependent, need protection from the powerful establishments. Even The Establishment of Kindness. 

Her story is a fitting one for times like these when we are becoming more sensitive to the problems of doing good. 

Once, protective statues like the one that loosed the Furies on Mary Northern, seemed to be entirely benevolent. We had an almost naive confidence in professional need-fillers who had, in turn, naive self-confidence. As David Rotherman wrote in a small, intriguing book called "Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence": "In their eagerness to play parent to the child, they did not pause to ask whether the dependent had to be protected against their own well-meaning intervention."
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when caring is helpful and when caring is coercive. 

As Willam Gaylin writes in "Doing Good": "We can degrade people by caring for them and we can degrade people by not caring for them, and in matters such as these there are neither simple answers nor simple solutions." 

There is only the need for constant monitoring, tuning to create the sort of social planning that neither ignores a neighbor's plea for help, nor looses the Furies on an unwilling victim like the late Mary Northern, of Nashville, Tennessee 

Transcription Notes:
Margin notes are hard for me to read.