"Meticulously tracing the dramatic conflicts both inside organized medicine and between the medical profession and the larger society over quality, equality, and economy in health care, Peter A. Swenson illuminates the history of American medical politics from the late nineteenth century to the...

A profoundly important step in political development is the licensing of professions as quasi-public agencies of societal and especially economic governance. Medical licensing of the 1870s onward ranks as about the most important step in America’s move away from Jacksonian libertarianism...