Uncertainty in Medical Innovation: experienced pioneers in neonatal care

Abstract

Reviews the book Uncertainty in medical innovation: Experienced pioneers in neonatal care by J. Mesman (2008). This book aims to analyse actual processes of managing uncertainty in neonatal intensive care. The book includes many meticulous detailed reports of medical and nursing knowledge and protocols, complex clinical and social procedures, and intricate micro-records of babies’ fluctuating health status. Some parts of the book could be clearer. The two neonatal units are barely distinguished, although the USA tends to be the most pro-neonatal- treatment country in the world, whereas the Netherlands is famed for its caution. The author (mis)asserts that babies’ prognoses equate with their identity, and that the baby, referred to as ‘it’, is lost and forgotten inside the tangle of technology. It is disappointing that the real transforming neonatal innovations with babies as persons, agents and self health carers, are ignored. I doubt that practitioners would gain much from reading this book, and expect the main readers will be ethnographic researchers and healthcare lecturers and students. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)