When a Child Dies

the long version

How is it possible for practitioners of the healing arts to cope with the deaths of children and the devastating grief of their families? Physician Robert McKelvey looks squarely at this painful question and gets to the heart of it in When a Child Dies. Although the stories he tells are replete with heartbreak, the illuminate the successes and failures of medical training in helping doctors and nurses confront these deaths. McKelvey interviews members of a pediatric hospital staff, specifically those working in intensive care and hematology-oncology units where children often die and where caretakers have a great deal of experience with terminal illness. His interview subjects discuss their family backgrounds and what led them into medicine; their education, training, and on-the-job experience that help them deal with death; their emotional reactions to the death of a young person; and their styles of coping, both personally and professionally.