Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease Book

"Within the pages of Uncertain Suffering it becomes all too clear that race, class, and age converge to define a powerful triple blow that guarantees both subtle and outrageously obvious health disparities. Rouse moves gracefully from the subjective pain of adolescent patients in crisis, to the compassionate yet distanced professionalism of health care specialists, to the level of national policy, revealing a clinical world fraught with contradictions over how best to treat black, and, all too often, underclass children in pain. Uncertain Suffering will make a big splash within anthropology."—Lesley Sharp, Barnard College

"Uncertain Suffering will have a unique place in medical anthropology, public health scholarship, and the social sciences of health. It involves a layered and deeply philosophical approach to the limits of the role/ responsibility of modern American medicine to address the suffering of African American patients."—Rayna Rapp, New York University