Unity Of Mistakes: A Phenomenological Interpretation

The classic investigation of medical errors

"The Unity of Mistakes explores one of the most significant issues in clinical medicine It does so with considerable originality, and with great sensitivity to the realities of actual clinical work.... This is a substantial contribution to the sociological literature on medicine."
—Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

"The Unity of Mistakes demonstrates how difficult and common serious mistakes are for physicians, how hard each physician works to avoid mistakes, and yet how limited individual effort is."
—Atul Gawande, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School, and author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

"[Paget's] analyses... are acute. She crystallizes the temporal and moral ambiguities of actions that become wrong as they develop, of understandable choices and irreparable harms, of knowing too late. She is careful to separate the often muddled concepts of mistake, fault, negligence, and blame."
—Susan S. Mattingly, The New England Journal of Medicine

"[A] radical, thoughtful, and provocative analysis of a painful area of clinical work...For those who spend their time on the highwire of practice, Paget provides a framework for confronting and comprehending personal failures, and still leaves room to forgive and go on practicing."
—Richard J. Baron, Bioethics Books

"Goes well beyond other work on mistakes...Paget's work illustrates very well the relationship between the characteristics of work and its social organization."
—Gail Henderson, Contemporary Sociology

"Paget’s analysis displays her strong talent in uncovering the subtle qualities of the physician’s experience of medical mistakes, her sensitivity in responding to those subtleties on a linguistic level, and her conceptual skill in constructing new terms to reflect them."
—Ronald Silvers, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education