Hospital, Doctors and the Public Interest.

Abstract

It is often very difficult to review, with any sense of critical awareness, a volume which contains articles originally presented in lecture form. Hospitals, Doctor and the Public Interest represents a compilation of a series of lectures originally presented at the Lowell Lecture Series, held in 1963, at Massachusetts General Hospital. The main difficulty, alluded to above, is the reviewer's awareness that these efforts were originally directed toward a different type of audience, and when presented in written form, these same offerings lose some of their original impact on the reader. Regardless of these acknowledged limitations, there are several very serious shortcomings to this volume. Perhaps, the most immediate is the disparity between the title and the contents of the book. By the title, one would expect a comprehensive, panoramic analysis of the network of the vast complex which comprises the health service system in the United States. Instead, the