No Place Like Home

Buhler-Wilkerson links local ideas about the formation and function of home-based services to national events and health care agendas, and she gives special attention to care of the "dangeroussick, particularly poor immigrants with infectious diseases, and the "uninterestingsick-those with chronic illnesses.

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No Place Like Home sets out to determine why home care, despite its potential as a cost-effective alternative to institutional care, remains a marginalized experiment in care giving. Nurse and historian Karen Buhler-Wilkerson traces the history of home care from its nineteenth-century origins in organized visiting nurses' associations, through a time when professional home care nearly disappeared, on to the 1960s, when a new wave of home care gathered force as physicians, hospital managers, and policy makers responded to economic mandates. Buhler-Wilkerson links local ideas about the formation and function of home-based services to national events and health care agendas, and she gives special attention to care of the "dangerous" sick, particularly poor immigrants with infectious diseases, and the "uninteresting" sick-those with chronic illnesses.