No Place Like Home

Winner of the Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of NursingHonorable Mention for the Association of American Publishers Professional/Scholarly Publishing Awards in Nursing and Allied HeathNo Place Like Home sets out to determine why home care, despite its potential as a cost-effective alternative to institutional care, remains a marginalized experiment in care giving. Nurse and historian Karen Buhler-Wilkerson traces the history of home care from its nineteenth-century origins in organized visiting nurses' associations, through a time when professional home care nearly disappeared, on to the 1960s, when a new wave of home care gathered force as physicians, hospital managers, and policy makers responded to economic mandates. Buhler-Wilkerson links local ideas about the formation and function of home-based services to national events and health care agendas, and she gives special attention to care of the 'dangerous' sick, particularly poor immigrants with infectious diseases, and the 'uninteresting' sick-those with chronic illnesses.