Small Is Beautiful: Health Care With a Human Face

Author(s)

Loxterkamp, David

Topic(s)

Role of Primary Care, and Achieving Health System Goals

Keyword(s)

Quality Of Care, Policy Brief Commentaries, Rural, Practice Organization / Ownership, Population Health (PHATE), and Shortage Areas

Volume

Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine

As I was preparing to enter family practice training in 1979, I read 2 books that left an indelible stamp on my thinking about health and health care. The first was Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America; the second, E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher was a British statistician and environmentalist who saw a danger in our drive to create larger, ever more sophisticated and unregulated technology and in the distortion of the social structure that was required to sustain it. “Ever bigger machines,” he observed,” do not represent progress. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.”

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