In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century

By Rosemary Stevens

Book Overview

American hospitals are unique: a combination of public and private institutions that are at once charities and businesses, social welfare institutions and icons of U.S. science, wealth, and technical achievement. In Sickness and in Wealth helps us understand this huge and often contradictory industry and shows that throughout this century the voluntary not-for-profit hospitals have been profit-maximizing enterprises, even though they have viewed themselves as charities serving the community. Although our hospitals have provided the most advanced medical care for acutely sick and curable patients, they have been much less successful in meeting the needs of the chronically ill and the socially disadvantaged. That, Stevens concludes, is the next urgent task of social policy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801860490
• ISBN13: 9780801860492
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 472 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher