New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration

Abstract

The Farm Security Administration was one of the several New Deal agencies whose collective purpose was to provide for Americans left indigent by the massive economic collapse of the 1930s. It helped low-income farmers, sharecroppers and migrant workers to form farming co-operatives, created model resettlement communities, and provided tenant farmers and sharecroppers with their own land. During the course of its rehabilitation programme, the FSA learned that as many as half of all loan defaults were due to ill health. In response, the agency began a medical programme. Physician and historian Michael Grey uses oral histories, archival records and medical journals to bring to light the diversity, reach and complexity of the medical care programmes of the Farm Security Administration. Grey's history examines the programmes from start to finish and finds that they were both a rehearsal for more modern forms of medical organization and a lightening rod for contemporary critics of "socialized medicine". Acknowledging the effect of changing demographics (doctors, nurses and farmers alike marched off to war) and economics, Grey contends that these factors do not fully explain the demise of the FSA experiment in health care. Rather, the political wind shifted at the same time that the medical profession acted to protect its authority over the practice of medicine.