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. "Anyone interested in understanding the origins of our ambivalent relationship with home care will find Karen Buhler-Wilkerson's book invaluable."--Elizabeth Peter, JAMA "A compelling history with profound contemporary relevance."
--John Welshman, New England Journal of Medicine "Documents the persistence of the issues with which home-care agencies still struggle today."--Suzanne Gordon, Nation "This is a well-researched and balanced work that will capture the readers' interest ...It is a wonderful addition to nursing historiography."--Diane Hamilton, Ph.D., R.N., Nursing History Review