Stevens, Rosemary A.

Rosemary A. Stevens is a well-known and highly respected social medical historian. She began her career as a National Health Service (NHS) hospital administrator in Great Britain, and much of her subsequent academic work describes comparatively the orientation of healthcare in the United Kingdom and the United States. In her various scholarly works, Stevens has described how American hospitals are unique: a combination of public and private institutions that are at once charities and businesses, social welfare institutions and icons of American science, wealth, and technical achievements. This rare combination of public and private is different from hospitals in other advanced nations, especially her native United Kingdom. American hospitals have little concern with improving public health. Also, many professional healthcare organizations function largely as interest groups, jostling with others for political favors. Stevens' work is an alternative vision—one in which professionals, healthcare institutions, and government serve the public interest. She describes the American healthcare system without bitterness or anger. According to Stevens, this is how it is; it is not all bad, but it could be better.

Born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1935, Stevens attended Oxford University as an undergraduate, majoring in English literature. Later, she pursued graduate studies at Yale University, earning a master of public health degree in hospital administration and medical care in 1963 and a doctoral degree in epidemiology in 1968. After graduation, she taught at Yale University for 8 years, followed by a 2-year appointment at Tulane University. In 1979, she joined the University of Pennsylvania, where she has spent most of her career. Stevens served as chair of the department of history and sociology of science from 1980 to 1983 and again from 1986 to 1991, when she was appointed the first woman dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences. In 2002, she moved to Cornell University. Currently, she is the DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Stevens's scholarly works include Medical Practice in Modern England: The Impact of Specialization and State Medicine (1966) and American Medicine and the Public Interest (1971). In 1974, in conjunction with Robert B. Stevens, she published Welfare Medicine in America: A Case Study of Medicaid. This was followed by In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century—arguably her best-known work. Stevens organized and coedited History and Health Policy in the United States: Putting the Past Back In. Her most recent book, The Public-Private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Policy, includes 17 of her essays, spanning a 40-year period, from 1961 to 2001.

Stevens has received many awards and honors. For example, she received the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research for the years 1998–2003. In 2003, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine. She also has been given four honorary doctoral degrees.

Stevens has served on numerous boards and committees, including the American Board of Medical Specialties, the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, and the Milbank Memorial Fund. She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine (IOM), since 1973.

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