How We Care: The Centennial History of Baylor University Medical Center, Baylor Health Care System: 1903-2003. Vol. 1, and: How We Care: The Centennial History of Baylor University Medical Center, Baylor Health Care System: 1903-2003. Vol. 2: Medical Specialties and Nursing (review)

These two volumes weigh five pounds on my bathroom scales. As they trace the evolution of one North American health-care institution from the late nineteenth century to the present, they are not lightweight in content either—but H. Lawrence Wilsey may be the only person who will ever read every paragraph of these encyclopedic volumes. Wilsey is a management consultant who has served many clients in the "business, banking, government, health, education, and not-for-profit sectors" (p. 370). As preparation for writing the six sections of volume 1, he reflected on his forty-plus years of consulting with Baylor, read a large number of secondary and primary sources, and conducted extensive interviews. In this volume, he surveys the Dallas-based institution from its origins as the Texas Baptist Memorial Sanitarium (1900–1920), to its evolution as the Baylor Hospital and Baylor University Hospital (1920–50) and the Baylor University Medical Center (1950–80), and its metamorphosis into the Baylor Health Care System (1980–2003).

Wilsey deliberately situates the institutional developments at Baylor within specific economic and social contexts associated with Dallas, Texas, and the United States; though many data are given, the integration of these contexts with the extensive description of medical and scientific developments is limited. Readers are immersed in data, at times gasping for some explanatory and interpretive frameworks. Some may view the extensive quotes and appendices as more whirlpools of data, but they will probably appreciate the illustrations, tables, bullet lists, and endnotes. There are too many quotations, and too many of them are too long. No one reading these two volumes will be lost in abstractions or theoretical arguments.

With volume 2, the author becomes an editor as he arranges thirty chapters and four appendices about various medical specialties written by forty-four authors and coauthors. There are also chapters on physician group practices, institutional ethics, quality of care, research, Baylor physicians in World War II, women physicians, Asian-American physicians, nursing, Filipino nurses, and nursing in the operating room. One of the appendices deals with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The length, quality, and style of these chapters vary considerably. With assistance from eight colleagues, Marvin Stone, a past president of the American Osler Society, wrote the lengthy chapter 4 about oncology (pp. 50–78).This chapter contains 28 figures, 7 tables, and 137 endnotes; it is replete with details that begin in ancient China, India, and Egypt and conclude with Lance Armstrong's acronym for cancer. Elgin Ware, a longtime chair of the Texas Medical Association's History of Medicine Committee, wrote chapter 11 about urology (pp. 154–58); this chapter contains eight figures and no notes or tables. Robert Fine's chapter 22 about "Institutional Ethics" (pp. 247–56) is a concise overview of the development of clinical medical ethics at Baylor.

Some of the typed interviews associated with the first volume, and most of the chapters in the second volume, were previously published in the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings (for a list of chapters, see 1: 356–58; for a list of interviews, see 2: 366–67). Wilsey had a great deal of help from many persons, including about fifty named on pp. xiii–xv of the first volume and another forty-four persons named as...