Working Americans, 1880–2022, Vol. 18: Health Care Workers

This title marks the latest installment (after Teens in America) of the “Working Americans” series. This volume details the lives and work of a cross-section of health care workers throughout modern United States history. The profiles are an interesting mix of providers, clinical professionals, and non-clinical professionals, such as a hospital data-security administrator, plus relevant unpaid people, such as volunteers, medical students, and activists. Each profile includes a time line of relevant events and a good selection of primary-source documents. Some choices detract from the usefulness of this work. For example, there are none of the economic profiles and historical wage information that were great in previous editions. Credits for most of the primary-source documents are omitted, there aren’t any lists of sources in the occupational profiles, and the graphics are grainy and pixelated. The 150-page second section called “Health Care Today” is comprised of copied and pasted tables, charts, and maps from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, but there’s no original analysis or explication to enhance this public domain information.