County
Life, Death and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The amazing tale of “County” is the story of one of America’s oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From its inception as a “poor house” dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has been renowned as a teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city’s uninsured. Ansell covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the “Final Rounds” when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced. Ansell writes of the hundreds of doctors who underwent rigorous training with him. He writes of politics, from contentious union strikes to battles against “patient dumping,” and public health, depicting the AIDS crisis and the Out of Printening of County’s HIV/AIDS clinic, the first in the city. And finally it is a coming-of-age story for a young doctor set against a backdrOut of Print of race, segregation, and poverty. This is a riveting account.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ansell's dramatic account of the 17 years he spent at Chicago's 160-year-old public Cook County Hospital (now John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital), rising from intern to chief of the General Internal Medicine and Primary Care Division, presents chilling proof of the indignities, interminable lines, inexcusable delays, inferior facilities, and incomplete care received by uninsured, mostly African-American patients. At County ("a petri dish for vermin"), where clerks ruled the mostly open wards and unsupervised interns learned by trial and error on a "battlefield of medicine," he and his colleagues fought against party politics for funds to keep County open and establish pioneering services (e.g., breast cancer screening, HIV/AIDs care). With the nation's focus on a national health-care policy providing quality medical services to citizens regardless of race, ethnicity, and income level, Ansell's expos will shock and motivate readers to take a stand on the issue.
