Nursing, physician control, and the medical monopoly : historical perspectives on gendered inequality in roles, rights, and range of practice / Thetis M. Group, Joan I. Roberts.

Bloomington, In : Indiana University Press, [2001], ©2001.

xlv, 514 pages ; 24 cm

Includes index and bibliography: p. [477]-506.

"Exposing the meretricious lies": early women healers and nurses and the mythology of medicine's "natural" supremacy over healing. "The mere trivia of history"? the legacy of early women healers and physicians' efforts to exclude or control them -- "She hath done what she could": reforming nursing as physicians tighten the medical monopoly in Great Britian, 1800s to early 1900s -- The search for American nursing origins: differing approaches to the history of nursing and the medical monopoly in the United States, 1800s to the early 1900s. The purposeful move toward dominance: subordinating nurses and achieving a medical monopoly. "For their own good": Physicians manipulating, trivializing, and coercing nurses, later 1800s to the 1920s -- "The exclusive guardians of all matters of health": the consolidation of medical monopoly in the 1920s and 1930s -- A growing unease: nurse-physician interprofessional relations from the 1940s to the 1960s -- Reconciling practice with protest and confrontation with cooperation: nurse-physician relations in the 1970s. An outdated, burdensome model of monopolistic control: entering the twenty-first century with a fractured health-care system and continuing medical opposition to nurses' autonomy. Who needs the autonomous professional nurse? gender stereotypes remain central to nurse-physician relations -- Challenges to the medical monopoly: nurses' gains in direct payment, hospital privileges, prescriptive authority, and expanded practice laws -- The results of the medical monopoly: "A regulatory and policy-making quagmire".