My Deepest Gratitude to The British Library

To the incomparable staff at the British Library:

I am an American author who wrote an unsettling, meticulously-researched story exposing the conspiracy between the pharmaceutical industry and the US Food and Drug Administration … the latter’s abysmal failure to protect the public at large from the former’s greed and callous disregard for the sanctity of human life.

This blasé attitude is nothing new. The omnipotent have a long, inglorious history of blithely victimizing and marginalizing the one segment of society which most desperately needs help and is the least able to fight for it.

Finding Emmaus travels 350 years back in time to illustrate how we as a society historically and routinely trample the rights of the mentally ill. I never expected to uncover a conspiracy. Rather, I fully intended to illustrate how the mentally ill are disregarded and mistreated, but out of fear and ignorance, not out of malice. Imagine my surprise!

My greatest challenge was locating historic records dating back to the early 1600’s. In the grand scheme of things, US history is relatively young. Early settlers lived day-to-day knowing their survival tomorrow quite literally depended upon every minute they spent today. If they couldn’t make it or grow it or trade with the local tribes for it, they did without it.

That meant they had little time for such discretionary pastimes as writing their memoirs - and of course there no newspapers. So written accounts of the settlers’ lives, their beliefs and values and pre-conceived notions are rare … HERE. But in London, within the extraordinary archives of the British Library, I was able to find scores of books, letters, essays and diaries without which, though my book could certainly have been written, would not be nearly as rich.

Finding Emmaus is a deeply disturbing story about human frailties, the abuse of power and the indisputable human right of free will. The British Library played a significant part in the development of this book and for that I am deeply grateful.


Copyright © 2009 by Pamela S. K. Glasner, All Rights Reserved