Volume 16, Number 12 · July 1, 1971
The Coming Medical War
By Michael G. Michaelson
Shaw and the Doctors
by Roger Boxill
Basic Books, 199 pp., $5.95
The Quality of Mercy: A Report on the Critical Condition of Hospital and Medical Care in America
by Selig Greenberg
Atheneum, 385 pp., $6.95
In Failing Health: The Medical Crisis and the A.M.A.
by Ed Cray
Bobbs-Merrill, 257 pp., $7.95
A Sacred Trust
by Richard Harris
Penguin, 230 pp., $1.45 (paper)
Women in Medicine
by Carol Lopate
Johns Hopkins, 204 pp., $5.95
Negroes for Medicine
by Lee Cogan
Johns Hopkins, 71 pp., $4.95
Medicine in the Ghetto
edited by John C. Norman
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 331 pp., $6.95
Higher Education and the Nation's Health: Policies for Medical and Dental Education Higher Education
a special report and recommendations by The Carnegie Commission on
McGraw-Hill, 128 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics prepared by
a Report from the Health Policy Advisory Center, Barbara Ehrenreich, by John Ehrenreich
Random House, 279 pp., $1.95 (paper)
'Let us not wantonly weaken that persistent delusion,' Dr. Filerin urges a colleague in L'Amour médecin, 'which fortunately provides so many of us with our daily bread and enables us, from the money of those we put under sod, to build a noble heritage—for ourselves.' Today, however, it is not Molière, but Shaw who seems to have the squirming physician and surgeon by the collar. In the United States, where most medical practitioners are private entrepreneurs and good health is regarded as a commodity, Shaw's criticism remains fresh after half a century. 'It is not the fault of our doctors that the medical service of the community, as at present provided for, is a murderous absurdity,' he wrote in the Preface to The Doctor's Dilemma.
Review, 8363 words
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