ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the structural relations between physicians and those who capitalize them in some of the most important types of medical settings and financing arrangements. In medicine, the most important proprietary sponsors have historically been hospitals, which typically have not been employers of physicians for reasons to be developed. The concept of sponsorship is introduced to identify any relation between producers and providers of capital on whom they are dependent for capitalization of production and/or mediation of the market. The chapter explains the current medical relations of production, which are profoundly different from those in industry and are not characterized by structural concepts associated with full-time employment and industrial management. Proprietary sponsorship in medicine emerged in the late nineteenth century with the development of a significant number of hospitals for acute care. While dual sponsorship has prevailed in medicine, there are important historical instances of unified sponsorship where proprietary and market sponsorship has been vested in a single actor.
