The amazing tale of “County” is the story of 1 of America’s oldest & most unusual urban hospitals. From its inception being a “poor home” dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago’s Cook Region Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital as well as the health-care service provider of final resort for the city’s uninsured. Region covers a lot more than thirty years of its background, from the past due 1970s, when the author began his internship, to the “final rounds,” when the enormous, iconic Victorian about State: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago’s General public Hospital hospital building was replaced and a huge selection of former trainees collected to bet it an psychological farewell.

Ansell writes from the a huge selection of doctors who experienced the rigorous teaching process with him, sharing his vision of cutting down the world and of resurrecting a hospital over the verge of closing. County is about people, from Ansell’s mentors, including the legendary interpersonal justice activist Quentin Little, to the large number of sufferers he and County’s medical personnel labored to diagnose and heal. It is a tale about politics, from contentious union hits to battles against “patient dumping,” and about open public wellness, depicting the Helps crisis as well as the starting of County’s HIV/AIDS clinic, the 1st in the town.

Finally, it really is in regards to a young man’s medical education in urban America, a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of race, segregation, and poverty.