Managing madness: changing ideas and practice
نویسنده
چکیده
"semi-welfare state" (p. 29 )-reflects his historicist bias that events should unfold toward goals set by historians. To Katz, Western Europe provides models of "complete welfare states". Like most ambitious books, this one has flaws. The first four chapters are mainly about a few communities in Eastern states, rather than about America. Because he excludes health services (except public mental hospitals) from his study, he ignores the difficult question of how institutions treated the sick poor. His strong distaste for charity "reformers" leads him to ignore evidence that, after the turn of the century, some of them-Edward T. Devine, for example-were collectivists boring from within established agencies (p. 83). In his brief summary of public health work at the turn of the century, he uncritically (and uncharacteristically) accepts contemporary claims for its effectiveness in reducing mortality from tuberculosis and other diseases (pp. 141-142). At the end of the book, he ignores the influence of events during the Second World War on social policy in the 1940s and 1950s. He ignores rural poverty throughout the book. Despite these limitations, this book should quickly replace existing summary accounts of the history of welfare in America. Unlike this reviewer, moreover, many British readers will be heartened by Katz's polemical stance and his impatience with American exceptionalism in social policy.
منابع مشابه
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Medical History
دوره 31 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1987