ABSTRACT
American hospitals became successful at marketing acute services to paying patents. Public relations became an acceptable aspect of hospital management in the 1920s, with hospital fairs, radio spots, and even movies extolling the virtues of hospital care. As major expressions of charitable, social, and economic interests, the hospitals that developed in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth-century reflected the segmentation of American society into diverse ethnic, religious, and occupational groups and into defined social classes. Hospitals were both a concrete expression of solidarity and a means of providing training for nurses and doctors in groups likely to be excluded from other institutions. Reflecting patterns of social stratification and discrimination in their local communities, the new hospitals of the early twentieth century were rarely community hospitals in the sense of serving the entire population on an equal basis, even for inpatient care.
