One hundred years ago, in 1908, health care was virtually unregulated and health insurance, nonexistent. Physicians practiced and treated patients in their homes. The few hospitals that existed provided minimal therapeutic care. Both physicians and hospitals were unregulated. When patients saw a physician, they paid their modest fees out-of-pocket; they were more concerned about the wages they would lose if illness kept them out of work than about the cost of their medical care.
Medical science and technology were primitive, and there was little that physicians could do to treat most illnesses. It had been only 40-50 years since the first understanding of bacteriology, antisepsis, and immunology; 21 years since the invention of a blood pressure measurement device; and 13 years since the discovery of X-ray technology. It would not be until 1910 that the first drug treatment to destroy disease—and not the patient—would emerge or that surgery would become common for conditions like tumors, infected tonsils, and appendicitis.
