In 2008, pioneering cancer scientist and Harvard professor Jane Weeks drew her Jewish husband and fellow Harvard oncologist, Barrett Rollins, into a shared delusion — a folie à deux — that would culminate five years later in her shocking death. As they went about their public roles as authorities on cancer treatment, Rollins helped his wife continue to conceal the breast cancer she’d been hiding from him for years. Their delusion, that Weeks was healthy and cancer-free, was broken at last by a medical emergency that revealed the truth and led to their final, honest year together.
Rendered with the attention to detail one would expect from a world famous scientist and scholar revealing his most closely guarded secret, In Sickness is borne of Dr. Rollins’s need for understanding and, perhaps, judgment. This Bergmanesque, Harvard hospital-set love story is a 21st-century study of intimacy, morality, and horror as the charismatic Weeks succumbs to her illness, and Rollins stoically acquiesces to his wife’s demands until her passing frees him from everything except his implacable Jewish conscience.
