ABSTRACT
Many health problems require a level of medical treatment and personal care that extends beyond the range of care ordinarily available in the patient’s home or the physician’s office. This chapter considers the social role of the hospital. Besides serving the prescribed social function of providing medical treatment, hospitals can be viewed as a functionally specific social world. The chapter examines the organizational aspects of this world in the following order: the development of the hospital as a social institution; the hospital system in the United States; the social organization of hospital work, including its effect on the patient role; and the rising cost of hospital services. A legacy of hospitals as poorhouses is that of mental hospitals, the majority of which are operated by state or county governments. Multiple leadership, at least in its hospital version is actually a system of dual authority: one administrative and the other medical.
