In this book, Beuf examines the "social situation of the hospitalized child" in the United States today, based on her fieldwork during the early 1970s at two hospitals in the Northeast, a tertiary children's hospital and a medium-sized general community one. She describes how hospital routines, medical procedures, personnel attitudes, and technological advances traumatize and render helpless child patients already separated from their parents and severely stressed. Beuf faults nursing, and particularly medical personnel, for generally failing to consider the children's emotional needs or the way they are additionally traumatized by hospital procedures and personnel behavior.
Beuf ascribes this situation to a combination of (1) the manner in which children are usually treated in the United States—as generally helpless, incompetent, and powerless; (2) the adoption of a modified Parsons "sick role model"; and (3) the children's hospital's role as "a form of [a] total institution" (p 58), wreaking on its