Key Takeaways:

• Analyzes how physicians, hospitals, and insurers consolidated power across the 20th century, creating today’s medical-industrial complex.
• Introduces concepts like “professional sovereignty” to explain how doctors carved out authority to define illness, therapy, and legitimate knowledge.
• Shows that our current medical system is historically contingent—one possible outcome of battles over money, status, and control, not an inevitable endpoint.
• Provides crucial backdrop for understanding why alternative and nutrition-based approaches emerged in tension with, and sometimes in reaction to, this system.