Analysis Of Paul Starr´s Mending Bodies, Saving Souls

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Additionally, during this era, many people would live in rural areas miles apart from each other which also made it a struggle for a physician to get more patients. The book also talks about how the high cost of traveling to treat the few patients a doctor had caused individualism and isolation to the medical practices of many doctors. This caused a shift in where doctors resided. Many individuals who practiced medicine would move to larger cities in the hope that having more people in a confined area would bring in more patients for them to treat. Unfortunately, this was the mindset of the majority of doctors during this time. Paul Starr talks about how there was a massive shift of doctors moving and practicing in larger cities. In a matter of 40 years, the number of doctors in cities rose 45 percent but only decreased by 5 percent in rural areas. This caused a shift from rural to urban development. With the rise of large cities, the need for transportation was …show more content…

This is supported by Starr when he wrote, "…served to combat the traditional image of the institution as a house of death. Early hospitals were considered, at best, unhappy necessities" (Starr 151). Similarly, in a book titled Mending Bodies, Saving Souls the author explains, "beginning in the eighteenth century, however, intuitional crowding and cross-infection produced high death rates, creating a long-lived negative image in which hospital were categorized as "gateways to death"' (Risse 5). This shows that while hospitals were frequently used, they would only treat people who were to never leave the hospital alive. A reconstruction was necessary in order to create the hospital of modern society. What would need to change the death lingering hospital into homelike sanctuaries that would later become hubs for medical

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