In the early 1920s, with the nation still recovering from World War I, President Warren G. Harding founded a huge new organization to treat disabled veterans: the US Veterans Bureau, now known as the Department of Veterans Affairs. He appointed his friend, decorated veteran Colonel Charles R. Forbes, as founding director. Forbes lasted in the position for only eighteen months before stepping down under a cloud of criticism and suspicion. In 1926-after being convicted of conspiracy to defraud the federal government by rigging government contracts-he was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary. Although he was known in his day as a drunken womanizer, and as a corrupt, betraying toady of a weak, blind-sided president, the question persists: was Forbes a criminal or a scapegoat? Historian Rosemary Stevens tells Forbes's story anew, drawing on previously untapped records to reveal his role in America's initial and ongoing commitment to veterans. She explores how Forbes's rise and fall in Washington illuminates President Harding's efforts to bring business efficiency to government. She also examines the Veterans Bureau scandal in the context of class, professionalism, ethics, and etiquette in a rapidly changing world. Most significantly, Stevens proposes a fascinating revisionist view of both Forbes and Harding-and raises questions about not only the validity but the source of their respective reputations. They did not defraud the government of billions of dollars, Stevens convincingly documents, and do not deserve the reputation they have carried for a hundred years. Packed with vibrant characters-conniving friends, FBI agents, and rival politicians split by sectional and ideological interests as well as gamblers, revelers, and wronged wives- A Time of Scandal will appeal to anyone interested in political gossip, presidential politics, the "Ohio Gang," and the 1920s.

Before World War II, the great majority of practicing doctors in England and Wales were general practitioners. They performed their own surgery, and were accustomed to treating a wide variety of illnesses and symptoms. Specialists were few in number, tended to practice in large towns, and were often associated with major hospitals. But rapidly changing medical institutions and services in the twentieth century have compelled specialization even among more modest doctors and hospitals.

Before World War II, the great majority of practicing doctors in England and Wales were general practitioners. They performed their own surgery, and were accustomed to treating a wide variety of illnesses and symptoms. Specialists were few in number, tended to practice in large towns, and were often associated with major hospitals. But rapidly changing medical institutions and services in the twentieth century have compelled specialization even among more modest doctors and hospitals. While medical specialization was not new-for centuries physicians were differentiated from surgeons-twentieth-century science and technology emphasized and accelerated this difference rapidly. Medical care began to shift from services rendered by the general practitioner to the employment of those doctors with a special interest-for example, pathology, neurology, or cardiology. Author Rosemary Stevens, an expert in public health, traces, especially within the last two centuries, the patterns of English medical practice, institutions, staffing, and training, and their influence on specialization, the British National Health Service Act, and post-World War II developments. Stevens discusses the ever-relevant issues of income determination, medical education, and the future of the general practitioner in an age of specialization. Along with its companion volume, "Medical Practice in Modern England" is a book that will be of lasting value to scholars of medicine, medical care organization, economics, and modern social history. It is of special importance at a time of crisis in the health care systems of many European Societies. "A fine book. Carefully constructed, factual, elaborately researched, gracefully written."-George A. Silver, M.D., professor emeritus of epidemiology and public health, Yale University. Rosemary Stevens is professor emeritus of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsyvlania. Educated at Oxford, Yale, and Manchester, she has also taught at Yale University and Tulane University. She is the author of "American Medicine and the Public Interest" and "In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century."

"Stevens brilliantly views the hospital as a prism of the values and mores of society... She sees the stratification of the hospital population into private, semi-private, and charity patients as a manifestation of the social stratifications of American society." -- Reviews in American History

American hospitals are unique: a combination of public and private institutions that are at once charities and businesses, social welfare institutions and icons of U.S. science, wealth, and technical achievement. In Sickness and in Wealth helps us understand this huge and often contradictory "industry" and shows that throughout this century the voluntary not-for-profit hospitals have been profit-maximizing enterprises, even though they have viewed themselves as charities serving the community. Although our hospitals have provided the most advanced medical care for acutely sick and curable patients, they have been much less successful in meeting the needs of the chronically ill and the socially disadvantaged. That, Stevens concludes, is the next urgent task of social policy.

"For me, personally, the book constituted an invitation to rethink the relationship -- warts and all -- among the benevolent, charitable, and business missions of the hospital, while at the same time disabusing me of my inclination to cite history to support or defend a view I might otherwise have preferred to hold." -- Merlin K. DuVal, M.D., Senior Vice President, Samaritan Health Service, Phoenix, Arizona

"This book is beautifully written... and is must reading for anyone involved in the current debate on health policy. It will also make delightful reading for those who merely wish to view the shifting social andeconomic climate in modern America, as seen from the perspective of the hospital." -- New England Journal of Medicine

The reissue of Rosemary Stevens's groundbreaking book on the growth of medical specialties offers a new opportunity to consider the state of the American health care system. Updated with an extensive new introduction and a new bibliography, Stevens's book chronicles the development of the medical profession and shows how increasing emphasis on specialization has influenced medical education and public policy. She details specialization's effects on health care costs and on health care providers, and her concerns are especially timely: the implications of technology and the resulting ethical dilemmas, the issues of insurance, many people's limited access to care. As a long-time observer of American medicine, Stevens makes a valuable contribution to the current debate on how best to provide--and pay for--a high level of medical care in this country.