The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland

by Cheryl Mattingly

Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, this book explores the hope that inspires us to try to create lives worth living, even when no cure is in sight. The Paradox of Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them poor and all of them with children who have been diagnosed with serious chronic medical conditions. Cheryl Mattingly proposes a narrative phenomenology of practice as she explores case stories in this highly readable study. Depicting the multicultural urban hospital as a border zone where race, class, and chronic disease intersect, this theoretically innovative study illuminates communities of care that span both clinic and family and shows how hope is created as an everyday reality amid trying circumstances.

Genres: Anthropology, Medicine, College, Ethnography, Nonfiction

287 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a fascinating experience reading this book while living in a 'borderline' of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, amidst many of the public hospitals that are the settings for the clinical narrative dramas portrayed in Mattingly's book. While Mattingly's research mainly focuses on the interactions between occupational therapists and impoverished African American families struggling with care for a child with a chronic illness (such as sickle cell disease or cancer), her inclusion--somewhat obliquely--in this book of home health nurses is intriguing. She calls them some of the 'most liminal' and 'most hated' of all health care workers, but doesn't elaborate much on that blanket statement. She does make the very important case for how we use 'Othering' language in health care when we use the stigmatizing language of 'non-compliant patient,' but also when we use terms such as 'overwhelmed parent' or even 'heroic mother.'