The Medical Center.

Abstract

were primarily for protection of society, rather than for the welfare of the patient. Those with contagious illness, mental disease, and the poor and homeless were the major "beneficiaries" of the hospital care of that day. Childbirth was immeasurably safer in the home than in the hospital. The same was true in large measure of most types of illness. Modern medicine, and with it modern hospital care, is a product of the 20th century. With each advance in medical science, the public de-