The Political Economy of the Hospital in History

The modern hospital is at once the site of healing, the locus of medical learning and a cornerstone of the welfare state. Its technological and infrastructural costs have transformed health services into one of today's fastest growing sectors, absorbing substantial proportions of national income in both developed and emerging economies. The aim of this book is to examine this growth in different countries, with a main focus on the twentieth century, and also with a backward glance to earlier shaping forces. It will explore the hospital's economic history, the relationship between public and private forms of provision, and the political context in which health systems were constructed. The collection advances the historical world map of different hospital models, ranging across Spain, Brazil, Germany, East and Central Europe, Britain, the United States and China. Collectively, these comparative cases illuminate the complexities involved in each country and bring new historical evidence to current debates on health care organisation, financing and reform

Hospital provision in interwar Central Europe::A review of the field

This article provides a comparative assessment of the provision of hospital services in interwar Central Europe. It presents the findings of a project to review the primary and secondary sources available for the study of healthcare in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary 1918–38 and to provide initial conclusions about how these new states embarked on the task of constructing an institutional infrastructure. The historiographical and archival review demonstrates some of the problems inherent in comparative history, especially the diverse, and often patchy, range of sources available. Building on this it explores three themes: provision and growth of the hospitals of each nation; the impact of geography, especially urban and rural and western and eastern divides, on that infrastructure; and the modes and problems of funding institutional care. It considers the problems each nation faced in constructing a new national healthcare system out of two or even three existing modes of delivery and the barriers faced by largely rural nations when attempting to construct and fund a modern institutional infrastructure.</p

The Political Economy of the Hospital in History

The modern hospital is at once the site of healing, the locus of medical learning and a cornerstone of the welfare state. Its technological and infrastructural costs have transformed health services into one of today's fastest growing sectors, absorbing substantial proportions of national income in both developed and emerging economies. The aim of this book is to examine this growth in different countries, with a main focus on the twentieth century, and also with a backward glance to earlier shaping forces. It will explore the hospital's economic history, the relationship between public and private forms of provision, and the political context in which health systems were constructed. The collection advances the historical world map of different hospital models, ranging across Spain, Brazil, Germany, East and Central Europe, Britain, the United States and China. Collectively, these comparative cases illuminate the complexities involved in each country and bring new historical evidence to current debates on health care organisation, financing and reform