This book goes back to the origins of the transformation of health and medicine into a business, during the first part of the twentieth century, focusing on the example of Japan. In the past hundred years, medicine has gone from being a charitable activity to a large economic sector, amounting to 12–15% of the GDP in many developed countries, and one of the fastest-growing businesses around the world. Despite the mounting presence of the medical industry, there is a lack of academic work detailing this major transformation. The objective of this book is to fill this gap and address the following question: how did medicine become a business? Using over ten years of research in the field, Pierre-Yves Donzé argues that economic factors and business factors were decisive in transforming the way that medicine enters our lives. This book will be of interest to historians of medicine, business historians, health economists, scholars in medical humanities, and more.

Nursing students access to higher education does not mark the beginning of basic scientific research into this discipline, and it is now a struggle for this fact to remain visible. Prejudices, misrepresentations and myths mislead nurses about the origins of nursing knowledge. Discipline of Nursing allows us to compare significant nursing figures: Florence Nightingale (Great Britain) and her equally valuable counterpart Valérie de Gasparin-Boissier (Switzerland). The two distinct training models proposed by these illustrious women have retained their relevance into the 21st Century since as early as 1859. The discipline of nursing seems to be arranged in almost geological layers of knowledge that we can distinguish by studying the traditions of nursing language. This book aims to provide a better understanding of the nature of services provided by nurses worldwide.

Collective Entrepreneurship in the Contemporary European Services Industries provides a historical account and a managerial approach on how companies in the service industry have grown, innovated, and internationalised along the last centuries in Western Europe.

This book offers an analysis of the formation of contemporary hospital systems between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century. Based on extensive archival material and a broad international literature review, it focuses on the case of the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, and uses a triple approach that discusses technological innovations, hospital management, and health policy. This research is a major contribution to the history of medicine which gives a unique overview of the formation of contemporary hospital systems.

"Healthy Living in the Alps" explores the juxtaposition of the search for health as a cure for illness and its opposite, the celebration of health by the physically sound by examining the extraordinary parallel development of sanatoria and winter sports in Switzerland. The history of sanatoria and of winter sports between 1860 and 1914 is told in this comparative study that examines the relationship between the search for relief from respiratory diseases, such as tuberculosis, in high alpine resorts and the development in the same places of winter sports tourism. Four out of these five resorts owed much of their initial fame to their reputation as health centers: Davos, St Moritz, Arosa and Leysin. The first winter visitors to the Swiss Alps began to arrive in the 1860s and in the first four sentries they were health seekers, many of whom were encouraged to take outdoor exercise as part of their cure regime. They also had healthy visitors and companions who sought recreation while the invalids were resting as part of the sanatoria routine. Demonstrating that this is not just part of the history of Switzerland but of Britain too, biographical backgrounds of British visitors to the resorts give depth and context to a history of health and winter sports tourism by looking at the kind of people who would spend months of the year in the Alps. A discussion of the application of modern technologies creates an overall view of the growth of health and sports tourism in Switzerland.