Audrey Gale's Novel 'The Human Trial' Explores History of Sound Therapy

In The Human Trial, award-winning novelist, Audrey Gale, tells the remarkable story of Randall Archer, an underprivileged adolescent-turned-Harvard student with great ambitions of becoming a pathologist. Set in the 1930’s Depression era, “The story is about a young man from a violently abusive home who happens to be absolutely brilliant… he’s finished high school by the age of 16… and he has an opportunity… to get a full scholarship at Harvard University in Boston… he eventually leaps at the chance to get out of his home. So he leaves Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and he goes to Boston at 16, dirt poor, never been away from home before, and he begins his new life. So he ends up using the full scholarship ride all the way through pre-med, med, and then his specialization in pathology. While he is attending Harvard and finishing all of his degrees, he happens to work in the medical lab, and he meets a physicist who’s there developing a rather unprecedented and still unsurpassed today… and so they end up collaborating and it takes him into a direction that at first, Dr. Archer is thrilled about these, kind of, breakthrough discoveries… that discovery then takes him into a whole, sort of, [divergence] away from normal medical school practices… He realizes that what he is seeing is starting to take away the foundation of his Harvard medical degree… he’s veering further and further away from his medical training. It’s the Depression [and] he realizes that this could be a great threat to the medical establishment…”

Gale’s novel was inspired largely by historical events and also her own personal experiences. After some research, she found that there was an enormous gap between scientists who have made contributions to the medical world and the medical establishments themselves. When asked what the reason was for this huge divide, Gale said, “I attribute it to the inconvenience of so much of medicine being undermined during a terrible time in our economy… that would have put so much of traditional medicine at risk…” Therefore, many of the medical-related methods discovered by scientists past and present were, to a great degree, suppressed by those involved in healthcare services. Gale’s personal experiences also contributed to this novel and it stemmed from an unconventional treatment introduced by her veterinarian that prolonged the lives of both her 13-year-old, aging Golden Retriever, and her cancer-stricken father. Their treatments were a science-based approach involving sound therapy to heal their illnesses. “[My father] was the third step in a long line of serious interactions I’ve had that keeps bringing me back to this science until I finally couldn’t let it go….” Additionally, with all the scientific information presented in this book, Gale also made sure that her story was understandable to her audience. “…my biggest challenge was to take what [the scientists] know and put it together here because that’s what the science was about, the meeting of those two disciplines, and put it in plain English…”