Rockefeller medicine men : medicine and capitalism in America

Rockefeller and homeopathy were both products of the nineteenth century. From the midnineteenth century on, homeopathy in the United States appealed primarily to the upper classes

Medical education and medical research involved much larger sums of money than hospital construction,

organization and financing of hospitals clearly provides physicians with the facilities to practice their profession and make money, and it benefits the upper-middle and upper classes by providing them with facilities consistent with their social status

Most of the hospitals now in existence were founded between 1880 and 1920, and the middle class for the first time entered hospitals on a large scale." In 1873 there were only 178 hospitals in the United States. By 1909 there were 4,359 hospitals with a total bed capacity of 421,000.^

Physicians

Doctors had to turn outside the profession for capital, and in 1900 there was only one class who had such money. Wealthy capitalists were in a position to dictate terms to the profession—policies that served their own interests

The fewer physicians competing for consumers' dollars, the higher physicians' incomes rose and the fewer doctors who practiced in working-class and poor sections of the cities and in the countryside

The number of malpractice suits from 1900 to 1915 exceeded the number of suits during the entire nineteenth century

Between 1905 and 1910, thirty schools merged and twenty-one closed down altogether." The number of medical schools declined from a high of 166 in 1904 to 133 in 1910, 104 in 1915, and hit a low of seventy-six in 1929.

without sufficient capital and endowments, no medical school could survive in the era of scientific medicine.

the 1890s, for the first time in the United States, the medical profession came to exalt the scientist over the practitioner."*