Everyone's Children: a Pediatrician's Story of an Inner-city Practice

A promising young doctor, whose first book about becoming a pediatrician was hailed by Kirkus Reviews as "making the future of medicine seem brighter," now brings us into the lives of children and parents whom we all too readily reduce to statistics, to headlines, and to the purview of dispassionate bureaucracies.

Soon after Claire McCarthy chose to practice medicine in one of Boston's inner-city health clinics, she realized that she might as well have moved to another country?for the world within the Martha Eliot Health Center was unlike anything she had ever experienced.

Written with the authenticity that only a doctor in the field could evoke, Everyone's Children introduces us to youngsters who, despite their poverty, are full of faith, hope, and potential. Through Dr. McCarthy's eyes, we meet young men and women struggling to overcome drug abuse. We cry along with a sobbing child who clings to the foster mother she has known only two short days. We meet the young mother of a seriously ill child, whose life is complicated by an abusive boyfriend. And we are amazed and uplifted by families who thrive simply because they consider themselves lucky?not poor.

Writing with unaffected grace and wisdom, this young doctor shows us how all of our lives?privileged and poor?are an unnerving mix of the predictable and the utterly unexpected. Everyone's Children sets forth no prescriptions or policies. Instead, it paints a portrait of children who are, in fact, everyone's children because they are everyone's future.