Hum Nat (2011) 22:225–246 233 Centerwall (Frechione 2001; personal email correspondence Turner to Dreger, February 13, 2009, reflecting interview by Turner of Brandon Centerwall in April 2002). Willard Centerwall had been on the fateful 1968 expedition, and soon after he returned, Willard claimed to his then-teenage son that Neel had wanted to purposely let the epidemic run unchecked among the Yanomamö at Patanowa-teri. Willard told his son that, in Patanowa-teri in 1968, Willard had been morally outraged by Neel’s supposed denial of emergency medical care, that Willard stood up to Neel, and that Neel backed down and called for additional medical supplies. Turner and Frechione both got Brandon Centerwall on the record remembering this story from his father. When I came to this story, I realized that to a non- scholar, Brandon’s story might seem to bolster Tierney’s otherwise collapsing claims against Neel. The Centerwall story was certainly dramatic. For this scholar, the problem was that it also contradicted pretty much all non-hearsay evidence about these events. Still, historians don’t like to let even very lopsided factual contradictions lie if we can resolve them. So I wrote to Brandon Centerwall and asked him about the memory. Brandon took a few days and wrote back to me the most heart-wrenching response I’ve ever had from a source (personal email communication dated February 18, 2009; received February 20, 2009). His father’s story, Brandon explained in a four-page letter, “was entirely false with regard to those aspects of the story which are of concern to you.” Brandon went on to explain that his father was “a tireless worker, an excellent clinician, and a devoted instructor. . . . He was cheerful and upbeat in character.” And he “had a habit of padding his resume” and telling his son stories meant to make him more impressive, and in this case, a hero. Said Brandon, “the painful reality was that [my father] was a coward. . . .” Brandon had come to realize that the story of standing up to Neel was one among many tall tales told by father to son “for reasons of ego.” Willard had also told his son that he knew some Cantonese because he was in training for intelligence work on the Chinese front during World War II. Brandon later discovered that his father actually knew Chinese because he had had a Chinese girlfriend. Brandon wrote to me, “Perhaps the simplest, most direct way to an understanding of my father is to be found in James Thurber’s short story, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,’ a favorite story of my father’s.” Brandon is now sure his father told him the false story about Neel—in which Willard played the hero—to impress himself and his son: “I am certain that I am the only one to whom he ever told this fiction. . . . I suspect he felt confident that nothing would ever come of his telling me this outrageously false account, and he was very nearly right.” Brandon concluded, “So the story was false in all pertinent aspects. It makes me heartsick to have to write such things about my father.” I admit it makes me heartsick to have to relay such things about Willard Centerwall. One must wonder why, if they wanted to engage in historical scholarship, Frechione and Turner did not follow the most basic rules of historical scholarship by simply asking Brandon Centerwall to explain the apparent contradiction between Willard’s story and the rest of the historical evidence—a question that might have saved Brandon from ever having to air this deeper history of his father.