Are nursing homes for seniors a relatively new concept?

Are nursing homes for seniors a relatively new concept? How did nursing homes become a key institution for elder care in the United States?

Professor Emeritus Tom Broman talks to Christina Matta (Ph.D. ’07) about the history of elder care in Europe and the United States. They discuss the origins of hospitals in medieval Europe, the 19th and 20th-century demographic and social changes that shifted responsibility for care of the poor and elderly to the public, and the federal policies that shaped the development of the the nursing home industry in the United States.

Episode Links:

Tom Broman is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. https://history.wisc.edu/people/broman-thomas-h/

Tom is the co-director the Wisconsin 101, a collaborative public history project that explores Wisconsin’s diverse, interconnected history through objects. https://wi101.wisc.edu/

Christina Matta is the Career Advisor and Alumni Coordinator in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She received her Ph.D. in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from UW–Madison in 2007. https://history.wisc.edu/people/matta-christina/

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (London: Picador, 2014). https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250076229

Karen Humes, “The Population 65 Years and Older: Aging in America,” in The Book of the States v. 37 (Council of State Governments, 2005), pp. 464-468. https://www.csg.org/knowledgecenter/docs/BOS2005-AgingInAmerica.pdf

Frank B. Hobbs with Bonnie L. Damon, 65+ in the United States (Bureau of the Census, 1996). https://www.census.gov/prod/1/pop/p23-190/p23-190.pdf

Our music is “Pamgaea” by Kevin MacLeod. Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4193-pamgaea CC BY 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Please send us your questions for a historian: outreach@history.wisc.edu