The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity

Nadine Burke Harris, born in 1975, is an Ivy-League trained pediatrician. She’s credited with increasing awareness about how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) significantly affect health outcomes for people throughout life. The Deepest Well is the story of her evolving understanding of how the toxic stress responses resulting from ACEs show up on a population level as health disparities and in individuals as health problems that come out of nowhere despite no apparent risk factors. Burke Harris’s self-representation highlights the contradictions of her multiple identities and how she uses the tension among those parts of herself to do great things for communities.

Burke Harris’s primary persona in the text is that of the scientist—not the stereotypical scientist whose pursuit of knowledge is walled off from ordinary concerns and ordinary people, however. Burke Harris presents her practice of medicine and science as being motivated by curiosity and a commitment to serving people who don’t have many resources. She especially leans into being a scientist who can interpret complicated science for ordinary people. She does that by using people-driven anecdotes and clever chapter titles that connect science to pop culture (e.g., “The Sexiest Man Alive,” “Maximum-Strength Bufferin’”). Her carefully deployed jokes and colloquial speech are all designed to put the