Medical innovations not only create new treatment opportunities, but also new problems and dilemmas for medical practitioners and patients.  Uncertainty in Medical Innovation is a qualitative analysis of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) that explores the medical and ethical complexities and uncertainties that new technology has created across the medical arena.  As a site where hi-tech medicine and exceptionally vulnerable humans come into direct contact, a study of the NICU can reveal how society responds to health innovations for medical interventions, and explore how decision-making is carried out on a day-to-day basis.  The book analyses what actually occurs at the interface between medical diagnosis and prognosis, actors and technology and argues that moral boundaries and the ethics of health care are being reshaped by technological advances. 

1. Neonatology: A Permanent Dynamic of Change
2. Newly Born and Indeterminate
3. Co-Travellers
4. Uncertain Trajectories
5. Beacons on the Horizon
6. The Moral Load
7. The End of the Journey
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JESSICA MESMAN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology and Society Studies, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands. Her research interests and publications include the anthropology of knowledge and empirical ethics in critical care medicine, particularly on issues of uncertainty and resources of resilience in patient safety.

Winner of the 2009 Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize

Winner of The Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize 2009