Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World

That reminds me of a story. Up until the mid 1950s pediatricians refused to believe that parents were beating their children even though they kept seeing X-rays where long bones in arms and legs had been broken and were in different stages of healing. This pattern suggested multiple traumas. But when pediatricians asked parents about these patterns, the parents usually said they didn’t remember and the physicians then diagnosed the child as having ‘brittle bones’. Here’s how Ron Westrum describes this troublesome period. Pediatricians: