Forgive and Remember

"Certainly those who are all too eager to criticize the medical profession should read this book. It could generate some mutual understanding between public and profession."

"Based on eighteen months of field research in an elite training hospital, Forgive and Remember advances sociological theory on the nature of professional social control and deviance, and professional socialization. Focusing specifically on the training of surgeons, particularly on matters of mistakes, errors, and unforgivables, Bosk [analyzes] the process of how attendings and residents-in-training exercise control over one another, exact penalties when such control breaks down, and shape professional careers as a consequence. Such a process is problematic, fragile, and risk laden since it poses an inherent dilemma: Attendings must control residents to avoid errors yet allow them sufficient room to make errors from which they can learn and develop surgical skills."

"Bosk . . . watched [surgeons] and logged their behavior as other sociologists have observed aboriginal or street-corner societies, producing what can best be described as the definitive work on the surgeons' initiation rites."

"Forgive and Remember is a book about errors in the practice of surgery. The author, a sociologist, spent eighteen months with the surgical service of a major American teaching hospital. He lived and worked with the interns, residents and attending surgeons, and studied the ways that surgeons recognize and punish medical mistakes. Dr. Bosk's account of how these physicians think about the problem of error is extremely accurate, and applies in general to nonsurgical as well as surgical specialties."

Acknowledgments
Preface to the Second Edition: A Sociologist Puts on the Hair Shirt
1. Introduction
2. Error, Rank, and Responsibility
3. Routine Surveillance as Social Control
4. The Legitimation of Attending Authority
5. Climbing the Pyramid: Professional Control and Moral Identity
6. Conclusion
Appendix: The Field-Worker and the Surgeon