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Nursing, Physician Control, and the Medical Monopoly
Historical Perspectives on Gendered Inequality in Roles, Rights, and Range of Practice
by Thetis M. Group and Joan I. Roberts
Published by: Indiana University Press
560 Pages, 1 index
- eBook
- 9780253108616
- Published: October 2001
$9.99
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Nursing, Physician Control, and the Medical Monopoly traces the efforts by physicians over time to achieve a monopoly in healthcare, often by subordinating nurses—their only genuine competitors. Attempts by nurses to reform many aspects of healthcare have been repeatedly opposed by physicians whose primary interest has been to achieve total control of the healthcare "system," often to the detriment of patients' health and safety.
Thetis M. Group and Joan I. Roberts first review the activities of early women healers and nurses and examine nurse-physician relations from the early 1900s on. The sexist domination of nursing by medicine was neither haphazard nor accidental, but a structured and institutionalized phenomenon. Efforts by nurses to achieve greater autonomy were often blocked by hospital administrators and organized medicine. The consolidation of the medical monopoly during the 1920s and 1930s, along with the waning of feminism, led to the concretization of stereotyped gender roles in nursing and medicine. The growing unease in nurse-physician relations escalated from the 1940s to the 1960s; the growth and complexity of the healthcare industry, expanding scientific knowledge, and increasing specialization by physicians all created heavy demands on nurses.
Conflict between organized medicine and nursing entered a public, open phase in the late 1960s and 1970s, when medicine unilaterally created the physician's assistant, countered by nursing's development of the advanced nurse practitioner. But gender stereotypes remained central to nurse-physician relations in the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Finally, Group and Roberts examine the results of the medical monopoly, from the impact on patients' health and safety, to the development of HMOs and the current overpriced, poorly coordinated, and fragmented healthcare system.
Contents
Acknowledgments
General Introduction
Nursing, Physician Control, and the Medical Monopoly: An Overview
Part I. "Exposing the Meretricious Lies": Early Women Healers and Nurses and the Mythology of Medicine's "Natural" Supremacy Over Healing
1. "The Mere Trivia of History?" The Legacy of Early Women Healers and Physicians' Efforts to Exclude or Control Them
2. "She Hath Done What She Could": Reforming Nursing as Physicians Tighten the Medical Monopoly in Great Britain, 1800s to the Early 1900s
3. The Search for American Nursing Origins: Differing Approaches to the History of Nursing and the Medical Monopoly in the United States, 1800s to the Early 1900s
Part II. The Purposeful Move Toward Dominance: Subordinating Nurses and Achieving a Medical Monopoly
4. "For Their Own Good": Physicians Manipulating, Trivializing, and Coercing Nurses, Later 1800s to 1920s
5. "The Exclusive Guardians of All Matters of Health": The Consolidation of Medical Monopoly in the 1920s and 1930s
6. A Growing Unease: Nurse/Physician Interprofessional Relations from the 1940s to the 1960s
7. Reconciling Practice with Protest and Confrontation with Cooperation: Nurse/Physician Relations in the 1970s
Part III. An Outdated, Burdensome Model of Monopolistic Control: Entering the 21st Century with a Fractured Health-Care System and Continuing Medical Opposition to Nurses' Autonomy
8. Who Needs the Autonomous Professional Nurse? Gender Stereotypes Remain Central to Nurse-Physician Relations
9. Challenges to the Medical Monopoly: Nurses' Gains in Direct Payment, Hospital Privileges, Prescriptive Authority, and Expanded Practice Laws
10. The Results of the Medical Monopoly: "A Regulatory and Policy-Making Quagmire"
References
Index
Thetis M. Group is Professor Emerita at Syracuse University, where she was Dean of the College of Nursing for ten years. She is also adjunct faculty member at the University of Utah College of Nursing. She is co-author of Feminism and Nursing and has published numerous articles in professional nursing journals.
Joan I. Roberts, social psychologist, is Professor Emerita at Syracuse University. A pioneer in Women's Studies in higher education, she is co-author of Feminism and Nursing and author of numerous books and articles on gender issues and racial and sex discrimination.