Everyone's Children: A Pediatrician's Story of an Inner City Practice
McCarthy, whose account of her medical career began inLearning How the Heart Beats(1995), relates her experiences at a health center near a large housing project in Boston. Most of her patients were Spanish speakers, many from the Dominican Republic. Fortunately, the upper-middle-class McCarthy speaks Spanish, and as her clinical skills and understanding grew, so did her astuteness at picking up the different ways similar wordings were used by persons of differing nationalities. Besides the linguistic peculiarities, McCarthy points out such other distinctions of her patients as the widespread occurrence of asthma among the children, the medical and psychological problems that so-called welfare reform brought them, and the wife beating and sexual abuse of children rife among them. On the whole, McCarthy does not paint a pretty picture. Optimism occasionally does break through, though; it is rooted in McCarthy's class crossing and in some accounts of housing project families who overcome their surroundings.William Beatty