ABSTRACT
This is a critical review of sociological studies of mental and general hospitals. Hospitals constitute the fourth largest business in our nation. In 1961, the operating costs of our nation's hospitals were almost 9.4 billion dollars. There are about 7,000 hospitals in the United States, with about 25 million people admitted each year. They have become big business for social scientists, too. Medical sociology, a good part of which is devoted to studies of, or in, hospitals, is the fastest growing section of the American Sociological Association. The National Institutes of Health, as well as many other foundations, have distributed unusual largess in this research area. A glance through the annual listing of doctoral dissertations in sociology in progress suggests that the hospital is the most frequently studied organization in our society. In some sociology departments, like that of Yale University, the number of doctoral studies dealing with some phase of the hospital business far exceeds all other categories combined. Some hospitals, like St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., appear almost annually in research reports ranging from the casual observations of Goffman (e.g., 1961) to the industrial-relations type of surveys of Pearlin (1962).
