Small Is Beautiful: Health Care With a Human Face

Author(s)

Loxterkamp, David

Topic(s)

Achieving Health System Goals, and Role of Primary Care

Keyword(s)

Quality Of Care, Policy Brief Commentaries, Rural, Practice Organization / Ownership, Population Health (PHATE), and Shortage Areas

Volume

34(2):264-265

As I was preparing to enter family practice training in 1979, I read 2 books that left an indelible stamp on my thinking about health and health care. The first was Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America; the second, E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher was a British statistician and environmentalist who saw a danger in our drive to create larger, ever more sophisticated and unregulated technology and in the distortion of the social structure that was required to sustain it. “Ever bigger machines,” he observed,” do not represent progress. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.”
 

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