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The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry

The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry
By Paul Starr

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The classic. How doctors have organized the American health care system in their own image since the 1870s

Product Description

Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, this is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #15556 in Books
  • Published on: 1984-06-04
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 528 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Paul Starr is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and its Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Social Transformation of American Medicine and The Creation of the Media. Starr is the co-founder and editor of The American Prospect. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Customer Reviews

Great history of American medicine5
For anyone interested in the healthcare as a profession or area of study, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Despite the 20 years since its publication, Paul Starr's Pulitzer prize winner is still relevant today and in retrospect his projections made of the future of healthcare in America are surpisingly prescient.

The first book describes the development of the medical profession in early America providing a fascinating look at the social evolution of American society. The second book delineates the rise of doctors, hospitals and medical schools in latter half of the 19th to the early 20th century with the rise of science and a professional authority. The third book shifts the focus from the doctors and to the industry that medicine became as well as the various attempts at healthcare reform in response to rising healthcare costs.

My only criticism is that Starr should have devoted more pages to the root causes behind the rising healthcare costs that drove the reforms of the 1960-70s described in the third book.

Why the US has a private health care system5
This Pulitzer Prize winning history of American Medicine does a lot to explain why the domain of public health is so small in the U.S., and why health in the U.S. is mostly a private, as opposed to public, matter. It takes some fortitude to get through, but it should be required reading for anyone who has ever wondered why, for better and for worse, the US is the only developed country that does not have social provision of medical care. Hint: It's not an accident. Recommended

Read this to understand American healthcare.5
Since this book was written in 1985, I have used it to teach medical students about the changes in American healthcare. The last chapter, "The Coming of the Corporation," forecasts what has happened in the last decade. This book is a must for all who want to understand why the changes are occurring in American healthcare