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After Harm: Medical Error and the Ethics of Forgiveness
By Nancy Berlinger.
176 pp, $29.95.
Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
ISBN-13 978-0-8018-8769-7.
JAMA. 2007;298(24):2915-2916.
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No publication has transformed American medicine more than the 1999 release of the Institute of Medicine's To Err Is Human. Medical errors and medical harm have always been around, but To Err Is Human highlighted the enormous scope of the problem and initiated the first step toward finding solutions. That first step was the acknowledgment that physicians and surgeons were operating under the false and onerous assumption of infallibility. Measures to reduce errors solely through personal accountability, blame, and shame were likely to fail, but approaches that improved the system of care, while being attentive to human factors, were more likely to succeed.
In her book After Harm: Medical Error and the Ethics of Forgiveness, Nancy Berlinger points out that there has been scant attention to the second half of Alexander Pope's aphorism "To err is human; to forgive divine." This small volume addresses what happens after a medical . . . [Full Text of this Article]
James T. Li, MD, PhD, Reviewer
Department of Medicine
Mayo Clinic
Rochester, Minnesota
li.james@mayo.edu
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