Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. On the other hand, written by and for the Valaisan people, this commissioned work disregards mainstream medico-social history not a word about AIDS , opting rather for the disjointedness of an impressionistic narrative. The work is almost two books in one. This is followed by over pages describing hospital provision and, more precisely, the painful transformation of the non-medicalized hospital-asylum into an institution administering care.
Although assistance for the sick was the responsiblity of the localities, the canton's hospital system was simply a loosely connected string of widely differing institutionsβreligious, communal, or initiated by a particular doctorβlike island communities without a core.
Until the period between the two world wars, Martigny took in the elderly in exchange for a fee and participation in the maintenance work. Another curiosity was the rotation of local practitioners, who took turns to be the hospital doctor for one-year periods.
The anti-centralization tendencies were so strong that the project for a cantonal hospital open to any Valaisian citizen, regardless of their commune of origin, was permanently blocked. And the state? It was totally absent here. The booming postwar economy pushed the fragmentation even further. Indifference and disorder reigned throughout public health as a whole. The only period looked on kindly by the authors in the history of what was to become a Swiss canton , is that of the Napoleonic years, when the Valais was first an independent Republic β7 , then the French department of Simplon β Propagation of the smallpox vaccine, reform of the hospital accounting system, inquiry on the populations' health: order and Napoleonic rule contrasted sharply with the subsequent laissez-faire attitude.
In fact, the entire book could be read as a lament for impossible centralization. The most critical flaws were ethno-cultural antagonisms between the Upper and the Lower Valais, quarrels between neighbouring villages, rivalries between religious congregations. Consequently, a Federation of Anti-Tuberculosis Leagues was established only in , a canton sanatorium in and a nursing school in The gradual secularization of health care was not initiated until Intense provincialism, government inactivity, and balkanization: are these features peculiar to the Suisse romande?
