Chapter 5 explores the attempts of the American College of Surgeons to “sell” its standard hospitals using a series of community health meetings across the country. Understanding the need to create a market for its product, the College managed always to stop just short of the out-of-bounds capitalism that Flexner’s standardizing efforts had come to embody and that its contemporary, the American Medical Association, seemed fully to embrace. Though the story’s arc will not be unfamiliar to those who know of the work of other medical organizations of the period that were “selling” health with all the verve that patent medicine operators had deployed to sell their tonics, it turns both on the uniqueness of the College’s product—“standard” and therefore modern medicine—and on the surprising effectiveness of the College as a standardizing and advertising body.
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