Broken stories: Patients, families, and clinicians after medical error

Literature and Medicine

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 230-240

  Berlinger, Nancy ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; FAMILY; HEALTH CARE AND PUBLIC HEALTH; HUMAN; LITERATURE; MEDICAL ERROR; PATIENT; PHYSICIAN; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT;

HEALTH CARE AND PUBLIC HEALTH;

FAMILY; HUMANS; MEDICAL ERRORS; MEDICINE IN LITERATURE; PATIENTS; PHYSICIANS;

EID: 2142848596     PISSN: 02789671     EISSN: 10806571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2003.0014     Document Type: Review

References (14)

1. These distinctions derive from Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma and Its After-Effects" (paper presented at the Narrative Medicine Colloquium, Columbia University, New York, NY, May 3, 2003)
2. Sandra Gilbert, Wrongful Death: A Memoir (New York: Norton, 1995), 21. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text
3. Carol Levine, "Life But No Limb: The Aftermath of Medical Error," Health Affairs 21, no. 4 (2002): 237-41. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text
4. A. Russell Localio, Ann G. Lawthers, Troyen A. Brennan, et al., "Relation Between Malpractice Claims and Adverse Events Due to Negligence: Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study III," New England Journal of Medicine 325 (1991): 245. The precise figure cited in the study is 1.53 percent
5. Andrew R. Robinson, Kirsten B. Hohmann, Julie I. Rifkin, et al., "Physician and Public Opinions on Quality of Health Care and the Problem of Medical Errors," Archives of Internal Medicine 162 (2002): 2188
6. Levine, "Life But No Limb," 241
7. Michael Rowe, "The Rest Is Silence," Health Affairs 21, no. 4 (2002): 232-6. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text
8. David Hilfiker, "Facing Our Mistakes," New England Journal of Medicine 310 (1984): 118-22
9. (A slightly revised version of this article appears as a chapter entitled "Mistakes" in Hilfiker's book Healing the Wounds: A Physician Looks at His Work [New York: Pantheon, 1985], 72-86.) Subsequent references refer to the original article and are cited parenthetically in the text
10. Perri Klass, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student (New York: Putnam, 1994), 94
11. See, for example, Atul Gawande, "When Doctors Make Mistakes," in Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 47-74. Gawande is quite self-critical about his own role in a botched tracheotomy and offers astute social analysis concerning the care of the most marginalized patients by the least experienced doctors. However, the fact that the patient in the case he describes was a drunk driver, who did not wear a seat belt, and was obese, with a neck "as thick as a tree," may make it difficult for the reader to have any empathy for this patient, who could, Gawande suggests, have sustained significant brain damage due in part to "the disturbingly long period of time that she had gone without oxygen" (pp. 52, 55)
12. Howard Brody, "The Chief of Medicine," in The Healer's Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 1-11
13. (This chapter, slightly revised, first appeared in the Hastings Center Report 21, no. 4 [1991]: 17-22.)
14. Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text