The American hospital wasn't always around. As Stevens writes the hospitals of the early 1900s although equipped with the top technologies weren't the most prestigious.
Doctors made a majority of their money from surgeons, and referrals to surgeons.
The American Medical Association (AMA) was just founded, and in the first address ever given to the AMA doctors stressed the importance that hospitals didn't operate solely on the idea of commerce.
However who could blame the American system for looking for a little more money? The rich high-paid doctors of today were non existent in the past. It would become a highly profitable organization, but not until it became the standard for which the rest of the world is measured.
This standard began to take form when the AMA began to inspect medical schools in 1905. In 1910, a report published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching became the bible of medical reform.
Together the education reform and the surgical reform began to run parallel each others. Stevens said they had the same goal of professional upgrading, but they had very different agendas, opportunities and constraints.
One thing took the educational reform movement by storm, the introduction of the research hospital. Stevens cites the epitome of the research hospital was in 1910 when an entire floor was laboratories built in a hospital in New York. The hospital quickly became the research center of the US. Then a revolutionary concept was introduced, the internship. Soon medical students were helping to staff the hospitals which needed 24/7 staffing, and they began to practice the concepts that were introduced to them.
Stevens concludes by saying that most hospitals were never effected by the changes in the medical schools and the focus on research hospitals, but as they built these more advanced facilities and began to focus on a national scale, the focus shifted less on the communal and more to the national.
This would of course present a problem when in 1917 the US entered World War I, and a rising public and medical concern was that hospitals were no longer equipped to serve a middle-class consumer. They had either become too advanced and too expensive, or too archaic and outdated.
Doctors made a majority of their money from surgeons, and referrals to surgeons.
The American Medical Association (AMA) was just founded, and in the first address ever given to the AMA doctors stressed the importance that hospitals didn't operate solely on the idea of commerce.
However who could blame the American system for looking for a little more money? The rich high-paid doctors of today were non existent in the past. It would become a highly profitable organization, but not until it became the standard for which the rest of the world is measured.
This standard began to take form when the AMA began to inspect medical schools in 1905. In 1910, a report published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching became the bible of medical reform.
Together the education reform and the surgical reform began to run parallel each others. Stevens said they had the same goal of professional upgrading, but they had very different agendas, opportunities and constraints.
One thing took the educational reform movement by storm, the introduction of the research hospital. Stevens cites the epitome of the research hospital was in 1910 when an entire floor was laboratories built in a hospital in New York. The hospital quickly became the research center of the US. Then a revolutionary concept was introduced, the internship. Soon medical students were helping to staff the hospitals which needed 24/7 staffing, and they began to practice the concepts that were introduced to them.
Stevens concludes by saying that most hospitals were never effected by the changes in the medical schools and the focus on research hospitals, but as they built these more advanced facilities and began to focus on a national scale, the focus shifted less on the communal and more to the national.
This would of course present a problem when in 1917 the US entered World War I, and a rising public and medical concern was that hospitals were no longer equipped to serve a middle-class consumer. They had either become too advanced and too expensive, or too archaic and outdated.