Hideyo Noguchi — A Burned Left Hand, an Ignited Will

Born to a poor farming family in Fukushima, the infant who would become Hideyo Noguchi fell into the hearth at age one, leaving his left hand fused and farm work nearly impossible. His mother Shika pushed him toward learning instead.

The turning point came at fifteen: surgery, funded by supporters, partially restored his fingers — medicine had changed his own life, and that experience aimed him at it: "I will become a doctor and save people like me." The handicap itself became the tinder of his aspiration.

His intensity was ferocious; in America he produced research at a superhuman pace, becoming a world bacteriologist at the Rockefeller Institute, repeatedly a Nobel candidate, until he traveled to West Africa to study yellow fever and died of it at fifty-one.

His mother's late-life letter to her son in America — clumsy characters repeating "please come home soon" — pierces the chest at every reading. A wound can become tinder. What might yours ignite?

What do you work for?