Vicki Erickson tells the story of a premature baby whom she helped care for in a neonatal intensive care unit. The baby nearly died, but Erickson and others worked intensely to save her life. The child survived, went home, and for a time it seemed that this fragile life had been given a future. But six months later the baby was killed when her father threw her against a wall. The story’s title — Let’s Call Her Michelle — is itself an act of resistance against anonymity and forgetting.
The story reveals a danger present both in medicine and in philosophy: depersonalization. In medicine, patients can become “cases,” “diagnoses,” or “traumas” rather than persons with names, relationships, and singular lives. In process philosophy, something similar can occur when persons are reduced to abstractions such as “actual occasions,” “societies,” or “streams of experience.” Metaphysical categories can unintentionally eclipse the concrete reality of individual lives.
Yet process philosophy also contains resources for resisting this reduction. Whitehead emphasizes that every living person — admittedly a impersonal phrase — is a concrescing subject with physical feelings, mental feelings, subjective aims, a capacity for self-enjoyment, and a measure of self-creativity. Each person emerges out of relationships with others, including, in Michelle’s case, her very young mother and father.
Michelle was not merely an instance of a metaphysical category. She was not merely series of actual occasions. She was a unique center of experience with her own standpoint and way of feeling the world.
Here is the point. Human beings are not interchangeable examples of a concept but living subjects whose experiences matter in themselves and whose lives are internally related to others. Michelle’s brief life entered deeply into the lives of those who cared for her, especially Erickson herself.
The story also reminds us that genuine care involves vulnerability. Erickson did not simply manage a medical condition; she became emotionally connected to a particular child whose fate mattered to her. Michelle remained present in memory, grief, and moral imagination long after leaving the hospital. To resist depersonalization is therefore not only to remember names, but also to recognize that every person is a singular world of value that cannot be adequately captured by institutional language or philosophical abstraction.