County by Dr. David Ansell

County is the amazing tale of one of America’s oldest and most unusual urban public hospitals. From its inception as a “poor house” dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the health care provider of last resort for the city’s uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the “final rounds” in 2002, when hundreds of former trainees and personnel, many of whom shared Ansell's vision of resurrecting a hospital in critical condition, gathered to bid the iconic Victorian hospital building an emotional farewell before it was closed to make way for a new facility.

County is about people--from Ansell’s mentors, including the legendary Quentin Young, to the multitude of patients whom he and County’s medical staff labored to diagnose and heal. It is a story about politics; from contentious union strikes, to battles against “patient dumping.” Most importantly, it chronicles the battles for instigating new programs that would help to prevent, rather than just treat, serious illnesses, including the opening of County’s HIV/AIDS clinic (the first in the city), as well as an early-detection breast cancer screening program. Finally, it is about an idealistic young man’s medical education in urban America, a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of race, segregation, and poverty.

"Ansell skillfully humanizes questions of health-care policy by describing real-life scenarios . . . his gift for describing the connections between social forces and medical care, coupled with the vivid patient stories interspersed with trenchant critiques of the politics of health care, makes this work stand out."

--- Library Journal

"David Ansell has given us a classic of battlefield medicine, full of guts and blood and passion. I had to keep reminding myself that it's not set in an actual war, but in one of America's legendary public hospitals, where exhausted health workers pit themselves daily against the terrible damage inflicted by poverty."

--- Barbara Ehrenreich

"For nearly two decades, David Ansell, with grace humor and gumption served on the front lines, navigating a public hospital in disrepair and a population of patients debilitated by poverty and illness. Ansell's COUNTY is a poignant, instructive memoir, a sobering journey where idealism takes on the politics of race and poverty."

--- Alex Kotlowitz

"With the nation's focus on a national health-care policy providing quality medical services to citizens regardless of race, ethnicity, and income level, Ansell's exposé will shock and motivate readers to take a stand on the issue."

--- Publisher's Weekly