Chicago Medical History

The amazing tale of "County" is the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From its inception as a "poor house" dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been renowned as a teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. Ansell covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the "Final Rounds" when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced. Ansell writes of the hundreds of doctors who underwent rigorous training with him. He writes of politics, from contentious union strikes to battles against "patient dumping," and public health, depicting the AIDS crisis and the Out of Printening of County's HIV/AIDS clinic, the first in the city. And finally it is a coming-of-age story for a young doctor set against a backdrOut of Print of race, segregation, and poverty. This is a riveting account.

From 1866 until the end of the 1950s, almost all of the attending staff at Cook County Hospital--and thus the instructors who prepared physicians for their life's work--were unpaid volunteers. As was the case at all other large public teaching hospitals, appointment at County was an honor, public recognition of the doctor's professional reputation. Before all-fulltime salaried positions were introduced in the 1970s and 1980s, the surgery teachers at County were drawn from a "Who's Who" of Chicago surgeons. Over time, their students came to recognize how remarkably good these surgical teachers were. This book looks at a unique and unparalleled collection of individuals who together achieved something noteworthy. It is more than a history of a building on Chicago's west side--it is an inside look at the people who made Cook County Hospital a center of top-flight medical education and world-class care through the years.

The future of medical care is now high on the US political agenda, but few understand what it is really like to deal with the nation's health in the very battle trenches of American medicine. In this study, Lewis uses Chicago's Cook County Hospital as a microcosm of both the human and the social problems faced by America. She interviewed a wide range of people involved in the running of the hospital, from a former director to an elevator operator, and from a security guard to the head of the trauma unit.

This is the story of a great hospital, from its origin as a poorhouse to modern times. It chronicles the social problems, and political chicanery, as interns, physicians, and nurses struggle to care for the sick poor of Chicago. Since its founding, Cook County Hospital has been a center for medical education and research and has always been renowned for its work in trauma and diseases which afflict the poor and downtrodden.