That was a difficult article (pictures actually) to read. It shows (to me at least) how intimately our humanity is linked to a face that passes our own internal pattern matching heuristics. I'm not proud to admit my initial thought was not how difficult life must be for her but rather how deformed her face was. But then I was proud that my (our) inherent human intelligence and morality was able to put that thought as…
Well said. Even as our culture purportedly idealizes the value of a person's inner being rather than appearances, one of the uncomfortable things this story drove home to me is -- I can't say it better than you have: "how intimately our humanity is linked to a face".
The image used in the meta-tag for preview/social-media is especially striking to me: several surgeons crowd around the face to be transplanted as it lies, disconnected, as if it were just a Halloween mask: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/magazine/righ...
It brought to mind a memorable passage in David Simon's book, "Homicide", in which he describes the most disturbing stage of an autopsy:
> In the final phase of the internal exam, the pathologist uses the electric saw to cut the circumference of the skull, the top of which is then popped upward with a lever-like tool. Pulling from behind the ears, the skin of the victim’s scalp is then folded forward across the face so that any head wound can be tracked and the brain itself can be removed, weighed and examined for disease. For observers, the detectives included, this last stage of the autopsy is perhaps the hardest. The sound of the saw, the cranial pop from the lever, the image of the facial skin being covered by scalp—nothing makes the dead seem quite so anonymous as when the visage of every individual is folded in upon itself in a rubbery contortion, as if we’ve all been wandering this earth wearing dimestore Halloween masks, so easily and indifferently removed.