No Place Like Home: A History of Nursing and Domestic Health Care in America

by Buhler-Wilkerson, Karen

• ISBN13: 9780801865985
• ISBN10: 0801865980
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

No Place Like Home sets out to determine why home care, despite its potential as a cost-effective alternative to institutional care, remains a marginalized experiment in care giving. Nurse and historian Karen Buhler-Wilkerson traces the history of home care from its nineteenth-century origins in organized visiting nurses' associations, through a time when professional home care nearly disappeared, on to the 1960s, when a new wave of home care gathered force as physicians, hospital managers, and policy makers responded to economic mandates. Buhler-Wilkerson links local ideas about the formation and function of home-based services to national events and health care agendas, and she gives special attention to care of the "dangerous" sick, particularly poor immigrants with infectious diseases, and the "uninteresting" sick -- those with chronic illnesses.

Author Biography

Karen Buhler-Wilkerson is a professor of community health and director of the Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	ix
Prelude	1	(16)
PART I. Inventing Home Care in the Nineteenth Century
Trained Nurses for the Sick Poor	17	(12)
Creating Their Own Domain: Ladies, Nurses, and the Sick Poor	29	(16)
PART II. The Work and Reality
``Treatment of Families in Which There Is Sickness''	45	(23)
Caring in Its Proper Place: Race Relations at Home	68	(30)
Lillian Wald and the Invention of Public Health Nursing	98	(27)
Home Nursing Care---Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: A Photo Essay	115	(10)
PART III. Management and Money
The Business of Private Nursing	125	(21)
A Cautionary Tale: The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's Home Care Experiment	146	(21)
PART IV. Reinventing Home Care in the Mid-Twentieth Century
``An Unchanging Purpose in a Changing World''	167	(16)
Home Care Becomes the Fashion---Again	183	(20)
Epilogue: The Future of Home Care	203	(10)
List of Abbreviations	213	(2)
Notes	215	(68)
Index	283