County ─ Life, Death and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital

Here is the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From its inception, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the health-care provider for the city's uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, from the late 1970s to the “final rounds,” when the enormous, iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced and hundreds gathered to bid it farewell.Ansell writes of the hundreds of doctors who went through the rigorous training with him, sharing his vision of saving the world and resurrecting the hospital. County is about people, from Ansell's mentors to the multitude of patients he and County's staff labored to diagnose and heal. It is about politics and public health, depicting the opening of the first HIV/AIDS clinic in the city. Finally, it is about a young man's medical education, a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of race, segregation, and poverty.

DAVID ANSELL, MD, a Chicago based physician and health activist, has been an internal medicine physician since training at Cook County Hospital in the late 1970s, where he spent seventeen years. Now, chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center, he also sees patients, teaches, volunteers as a doctor at a Chicago free clinic, and participates in medical missions to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. He is married to a doctor and has two children.