An Eye-Opening Look at Development and Evolution of American Medicine
5 stars
This is a prescient, eye-opening look at how the medical profession developed in the US - from its pseudo-scientific origins, to its pre-regulatory phase, to its initial organization and professionalization, and ultimately to the sprawling web of practitioners, hospitals, payers, and political stakeholders. The fact that early doctors received only room and board during residency, with the hopes that patients who they treated would follow them to private practice, and yet was able to form a professional organization to both enforce standards and act as a modern guild to drive up wages and prestige is incredible. The chapters on more recent eras will be more familiar to most readers, but learning that we were within a hair's breadth of having single payer insurance in 1974 was genuinely heartbreaking.
The original version of this book was written in 1982 and it holds up ridiculously well, although one will have to …
This is a prescient, eye-opening look at how the medical profession developed in the US - from its pseudo-scientific origins, to its pre-regulatory phase, to its initial organization and professionalization, and ultimately to the sprawling web of practitioners, hospitals, payers, and political stakeholders. The fact that early doctors received only room and board during residency, with the hopes that patients who they treated would follow them to private practice, and yet was able to form a professional organization to both enforce standards and act as a modern guild to drive up wages and prestige is incredible. The chapters on more recent eras will be more familiar to most readers, but learning that we were within a hair's breadth of having single payer insurance in 1974 was genuinely heartbreaking.
The original version of this book was written in 1982 and it holds up ridiculously well, although one will have to forgive some anachronistic term usage. The new edition has an extra section bringing the history up to 2016. Highly recommend