"No Place Like Home sets out to determine why home care, a preferred, rational, and cost-effective alternative to institutional care, remains a marginalized experiment in care giving. Nurse-historian Karen Buhler-Wilkerson traces the history of home care from its nineteenth-century origins in organized visiting nurses' associations, through a time when professional home care nearly disappeared, on to the 1960s, when a new wave of home care gathered force as physicians, hospital managers, and policy makers responded to economic mandates." "Karen Buhler-Wilkerson is a professor of community health and director of the Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing."--Jacket.

pt. 1.Inventing home care in the nineteenth century -- 1. Trained nurses for the sick poor -- 2. Creating their own domain : ladies, nurses, and the sick poor -- pt. 2. The work and reality -- 3. "Treatment of families in which there is sickness" -- 4. Caring in its proper place : race relations at home -- 5. Lillian Wald and the invention of public health nursing -- Home nursing care--yesterday, today, and tomorrow : a photo essay -- pt. 3. Management and money -- 6. The business of private nursing -- 7. A cautionary tale : the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's home care experiment -- pt. 4. Reinventing home care in the mid-twentieth century -- 8. "An unchanging purpose in a changing world" -- 9. Home care becomes the fashion again.