Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [193]
you didn’t know much about your own body. My discussion of what young children do and don’t know about themselves and other people is drawn from Susan Carey’s Conceptual Change in Childhood (The MIT Press, 1987). See especially Chapter Two, “The Human Body.” The details of what children know about the contents of their body can be found on pp. 42–43. The quote about lungs being for your hair is on p. 47. The information on gender constancy is on pp. 52–54. A discussion of childhood understandings of sex and reproduction is on pp. 54–59.
Children believe in things like Santa Claus. This same point was made by Jacqueline Woolley, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in an opinion piece in the New York Times, “Do You Believe in Surnits?” Dec. 23, 2006.
“a duck, which then turns into a rabbit” (FN). Carey, 59. The psychologists she quotes are Anne C. Bernstein and Philip A. Cowan, “Children’s Concepts of How People Get Babies,” Child Development, Vol. 46 (1975), 77–91.
recent work in developmental psychology suggests that error might play the same role in the lives of children as it does in the lives of scientists. The work in question comes largely from the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, run by the cognitive scientist Laura Schulz—better known to me as my sister.
“attempts to get the client to question and change.” Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions (Free Press, 2002), 39.
Heinz Hartmann noted that. Quoted in Bok, Secrets, 61.
“‘I hope Jesse Jackson gets AIDS and dies.’” Terkel, 278.
“The main interest in life and work.” “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault, Oct. 25th, 1982,” Luther H. Martin et al., eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 9.
“Since I changed.” Terkel, 278.
CHAPTER 14 THE PARADOX OF ERROR
The story of the wrong-side surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center comes from my interview with Paul Levy, from Levy’s postings about the incident on his blog, “Running a Hospital,” especially “The Message You Hope Never to Send” (http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/2008/07/message-you-hope-never-to-send.html), and from coverage of the incident in the Boston Globe, especially Stephen Smith, “Surgeon Operates on Patient’s Wrong Side,” July 3, 2008; and Stephen Smith, “Hospital Tells of Surgery on Wrong Side,” July 4, 2008. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Paul Levy are from my interview with him. Note that there is one inconsistency in the Globe’s coverage of the wrong-side surgery; according to the July 3 article, the patient was notified of the mistake by the surgeon. However, Paul Levy told me that the patient informed the doctor of the mistake, not vice versa.
BIDMC’s efforts to eliminate medical error are described in Levy’s blog in a post entitled “Aspirations for BIDMC and BID-Needham,” Jan. 17, 2008 (http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/2008/01/aspirations-for-bidmc-and-bidneedham.html); and in Jeffrey Krasner, “Hospital Aims to Eliminate Mistakes,” the Boston Globe, Jan. 17, 2008.
The discussion of democracy in this chapter is greatly indebted to Richard Hofstadter’s The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (University of California Press, 1969), 56. I am grateful to Stephen Frug for suggesting that I read it.
According to the Institute of Medicine. Linda T. Kohn, Janet M. Corrigan, and Molla S. Donaldson, eds., To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, a report by the National Institute of Medicine (National Academies Press, 2000), 26. This is the source for both the number of people killed by medical error every year and for the ranking of medical error among other causes of death in the United States. A third figure, that of the total number of people affected by medical error, is an extrapolation. According to the report, at least a million patients are affected by “adverse events,” which include but are not limited to error. (For instance, a case