This book report is based on Making Gray Gold: Narratives of Nursing Home Care by Timothy Diamond. The book was published by The University of Chicago Press. It consists of 280 pages, including index.
The main theme of Making Gray Gold is that nursing homes are bureaucratic institutions that could use a healthy dose of "mother's wit." Mother's wit describes the maternal feelings and interpersonal skills needed by all persons who give primary care to the elderly: "Mother's wit is not an abstract concept or a set of ideas; it is the wide range of practices that hold the organization together" (241). Nursing is a caring profession, and nowhere is compassion and insight more needed than in the sterile environment of the nursing home. As Diamond's instructor advised him, "You have to look into a patient's eyes as much as you can, and learn to get the signals from there" (17).
Diamond elaborates on his theme by recounting his experiences as a nursing assistant in various nursing homes in the United States. The author, a male, completed training as a nursing assistant and went "undercover" while gathering information for this ethnographic study. In other words, Diamond, a sociologist by education and training, rarely revealed that he was researching and writing this book. He realized that thorough immersion into the nursing home environment was required to investigate core living conditions.
The nursing assistants in the nursing homes Diamond investigated are constrained by bureaucratic regulations designed to facilitate recordkeeping, not necessarily the comfort of the patients. For instance, regulations require all patients to shower in the morning. Because the nursing facility's water heating system has a finite amount of hot water available, the residents who were the last cleansed invariably were forced to take cold showers: "A few of the more frail were frightened just by the shower itself. For many, with bri...