Andrew Thomas Simpson

This dissertation focuses on how medical centers became major employers in the early postwar years; how they leveraged Great Society monies to take an active role in promoting community health and job training initiatives; how each leveraged particular services like cardiac surgey and transplantation medicine during the 1970s and 1980s; how each medical center emerged as central to efforts to reinvent urban economies around the promises of biotechnology in the mid-1980s and 1990’; and how the creation of multi-hospital systems encouraged an entrepreneurial business model that forced AMCs to renegotiate their relationships with cities, employees, and patients while raising questions about the appropriateness of their charitable protections.