New deal medicine : the rural health programs of the Farm Security Administration / Michael R. Grey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Grey, Michael R.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rural health services--United States--History.

Rural health services.

United States. Farm Security Administration. Health Services Division--History.

United States.

United States. Farm Security Administration. Health Services Division.

History.

Rural Health Services--history.

Medical Subjects:

Rural Health Services--history.

United States.

Physical Description:

xvii, 238 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Summary:

The Farm Security Administration was one of several New Deal agencies whose collective purpose was to provide for Americans left indigent by the massive economic collapse of the 1930s. The agency helped low-income farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers to form farming cooperatives, created model resettlement communities, and provided tenant farmers and sharecroppers with their own land. During the course of its rehabilitation work, the FSA learned that as many as half of all loan defaults were due to ill health. In response, the agency began a medical care program that the Saturday Evening Post labeled "a gigantic rehearsal" for national health insurance. At its peak, the FSA programs provided some 650,000 people and more than a million migrant workers with needed medical care, and represented the New Deal's most significant involvement in health care delivery.

In New Deal Medicine, physician and historian Michael Grey uses oral histories, archival records, and medical journals to bring to light the diversity, reach, and complexity of the medical care programs of the Farm Security Administration. Grey's history examines the programs from start to finish and finds that they were both a rehearsal for more modern forms of medical organization and a lightning rod for contemporary critics of "socialized medicine."

Acknowledging the effect of changing demographics (doctors, nurses, and farmers alike marched off to war) and economics, Grey contends that these factors do not fully explain the demise of the FSA experiment in health care. Rather, the political wind shifted at the same time that the medical profession acted to protect its authority over the practice of medicine.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-225) and index.

ISBN:

0801859395

OCLC:

38936665