The Social Transformation of American Medicine
Quotes and highlights from The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr — 3 passages I marked up while reading (February 2026). Everything below is taken straight from my Kindle, unedited and in the order I read it.
What this book keeps circling back tophysician, adapted, advancing, consult, authority and professional.
All 3 highlights
Of course a doctor should try to cure the patient by natural means. But such remedies were to be employed cautiously, with the recognition that they could only work if God permitted. It was lawful to take physic, but unlawful to trust in it too much.… Health came from God, not from Doctors.”
Previously confined to those who could consult a physician, the authority of medicine now reached the far larger number who could consult a physician’s book. Increasing the autonomous competence of the public helped prepare the ground for its later acceptance of professional authority.
At Oxbridge physicians studied the classics; at the London hospitals they acquired more practical experience. This system, poorly adapted for advancing science, was well adapted for advancing careers, for professional success depended on acquiring the proper social graces and connections.15
What I've written around this
Where these ideas turn up in my own work.
- Hopelessness KillsFrom that study we now know that hopelessness can kill. Homelessness is a crisis, and it is a crisis that need not exist.
- On Inequality, Happiness, and Our FutureThe exploiters of today do not own slaves; they employ and pay them. The exploiters of today do not aim to control the television — they instead put forth appealing new platforms.
- The White Man's Poverty, Pt. 1I grapple with the idea of inequality and the many crevices of human organization its various vestiges can creep into.
Read alongside
Other books on the shelf that cover similar ground.
I write about what I read — medicine, technology, and what holds up across centuries — in Side Effects. The essays live in the archive, and the rest of the shelf is on Book Notes.