Everything I know about health care I learned in the Pentagon in World War II.
This is a brief autobiographical account by the chief logistical adviser to the surgeon general of the army of his experiences during World War II, when at peak army hospitals had 600,000 patients in bed on one day and used 40,000 physicians, 100,000 nurses, and 600,000 medical corpsmen to care for them. The recapitulation of that experience calls attention to the fragility of hospital planning, the dangers that underemployed physicians will overtreat patients, the advantages of using nurses as patient care managers in hospitals, and the desirability of not operating too close to the margin. These events of World War II also provide background for understanding the origins of three major post-World War II transformations of U.S. medicine, specifically the much-enhanced demand by the American public for access to a much higher level of medical care than that to which they had earlier been accustomed; the greatly enlarged expenditures of the federal government for basic biomedical research, which derived momentum from the success of research during World War II; and the victory of specialism that captured U.S. medical education and treatment.
Ginzberg
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Eisenhower Center for the Conservation of Human Resources, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027.
D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration; D049673:History, 20th Century; D008887:Military Medicine / Q000458:organization & administration; D009732:Nursing Care / Q000458:organization & administration; D014481:United States; D014857:Warfare