NEWTON'S LAW: LOOK BACK IN ANGER: WOMAN WILL NOT DIE ONLY AS A STATISTIC

Leave it to that old Bolshevik Joseph Stalin to strike the right tone. He is credited with this quotation: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

His point is concise, well-made and affirmed countless times. Calamity en masse is abstract, hard to grasp. Typhoons, volcanoes and famine spill anonymous bodies around, yet they only become an indistinct portion of the cumulative mayhem.

Stalin's ironic proposition is that catastrophe is best understood not through an aggregate of destruction but through isolated incidents of hardship, episodes of individual mischance. We can know the whole puzzle by staring closely at one piece of it, goes the argument.

News publications cater to this quality of human nature. When a volcano erupts in the Philippines, news consumers relate less with the fact smoke blows miles straight up (who knows the difference anyway between two vertical miles and ten?) than they do with the trials of American military family (maybe one from a town you've heard of) trying to flee the premises.

You may not know these people, but neither are they faceless. They have a name you recognize (David, or Mary) and a situation you can identify with (trying their best to survive an event beyond their control).

Our interest is raised beyond what is due a generic disaster; rather, it becomes a personal matter. We are given a scale for the suffering involved in an incident so grand only God can comprehend it.

There are even times when parts become greater than their sum, where individuals grow to represent the sad events that have enveloped them. Their fates become synonymous with those circumstances altering their lives.

Such was the case of AIDS and Ryan White. An Indiana youth, Ryan was a hemophiliac who got the disease from a blood transfusion and fought a legal battle after being banned from a public school district that feared his presence.

His story came to represent the anxiety this nation felt in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. By the time of his death, Ryan was a symbol of courage in the face of insurmountable odds. He did the nation a good turn in prompting us to show compassion for those with this ghastly disease.

Draw a similar scenario, but with a more sour twist, from the story of Kimberly Bergalis. At 23, she is a Floridian dying of AIDS. Like Ryan, she did nothing "wrong" to facilitate her cruel destiny: she did not practice unsafe sex, she did not abuse intravenous drugs.

What she did was go to a dentist. The dentist had AIDS and, without notifying patients of his condition, continued to work inside their mouths. The dentist died and five of his patients now have AIDS; one of them is Bergalis, who will not live out the year.

In her weakening state, Bergalis composed a letter that looks back in anger at the events leading to her painful demise. Among her targets is a health-care community that has been slow to govern itself in dealing with a hellish disease. An American Medical Association task force Tuesday recommended against mandatory AIDS testing for doctors. A vote on the matter by the group's House of Delegates is expected today.

Bergalis felt her last worthwhile act of this life might be to effect some law that would protect others from her fate.

She might not live to see such a law, but her letter and its lingering message that luck might be just as harsh for each of us ensures she will not die only as a statistic.