With these issues in mind, this book reports a study of over 700 unselected male patients treated in the medical wards of four Scottish hospitals. Their social circumstances, working conditions, and medical history were investigated, and the men themselves were visited in hospital and at home three months and then two years later to see how they progressed.
The report focuses on the question of what we really want of our hospital service. As the authors say: ‘it is surely wasteful to spend large sums on expensive hospital care, only to return a man to living and working conditions that are almost certain to drive him back to hospital in a few months’.