No Place Like Home ─ A History of Nursing and Home Care in the United States

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.

Karen Buhler-Wilkerson is a professor of community health and director of the Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.