Comparative health policy: an introduction -- The context of health care -- Funding, provision, and governance -- Setting priorities and allocating resources -- The medical profession -- Beyond the hospital: health care in the home -- Public health -- Understanding health policy comparatively

This book goes back to the origins of the transformation of health and medicine into a business, during the first part of the twentieth century, focusing on the example of Japan. In the past hundred years, medicine has gone from being a charitable activity to a large economic sector, amounting...

"This book is a business history of a transnational Japanese pharmaceutical company in the early twentieth century, Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, and a commodity history of its involvement in opium, quinine, and consumer medicines in both Japan and its expanding empire."