American Catholic Hospitals

Price: $45.95

Subtitle: A Century of Changing Markets and Missions
Author: Barbra Mann Wall
Subject: Medicine, Women's Studies, History
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4940-8
Pages: 256 pages
Publication Date: March 2011
Series: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Praise:

"American Catholic Hospitals offers a tremendous amount of new material and refreshing perspectives on current health care system challenges in the United States."—Sioban Nelson, Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto

"Wall traces the nursing and management roles of nuns and brothers in church-related US health care institutions. This well-documented volume will be a useful addition for collections supporting academic programs in public health, hospital administration, bioethics, and divinity, and for comprehensive collections in the history of medicine. Recommended."—Choice

"Wall provides solid scholarship and engaging insight into the historic and contemporary contributions of American Catholic hospitals and their ability to adapt and serve amid the changing landscapes of church and state, culture wars, and healthcare reforms of the 20th century."—Carol K. Coburn, author of Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920

Description:

In American Catholic Hospitals, Barbra Mann Wall chronicles changes in Catholic hospitals during the twentieth century, many of which are emblematic of trends in the American healthcare system.

Wall explores the Church's struggle to safeguard its religious values. As hospital leaders reacted to increased political, economic, and societal secularization, they extended their religious principles in the areas of universal health care and adherence to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, leading to tensions between the Church, government, and society. The book also examines the power of women--as administrators, Catholic sisters wielded significant authority--as well as the gender disparity in these institutions which came to be run, for the most part, by men. Wall also situates these critical transformations within the context of the changing Church policy during the 1960s. She undertakes unprecedented analyses of the gendered politics of post-Second Vatican Council Catholic hospitals, as well as the effect of social movements on the practice of medicine.

BARBRA MANN WALL is an associate professor and associate director at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania. Her book Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace, 1865ñ1925 won the 2006 Lavinia Dock Award for Best Book, American Association for the History of Nursing.