Rosemary A. Stevens

Professor Rosemary A. Stevens is a DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar in Social Medicine and Public Policy at Weill Cornell Medical College, Department of Psychiatry. She is also the Stanley I. Sheerr Professor Emeritus in Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member (and sometime chair) of the Department of History and Sociology of Science and a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Stevens holds an MPH degree in health services administration and policy, and a PhD in epidemiology, both from Yale. Between 1968 and 1976, she held subsequent assistant, associate and full professor positions at the Yale Medical School in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, and was also a fellow at Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy Studies. In 1976 she moved to Tulane, serving as chair of the department of health systems management just as profit-making hospitals were moving to center stage -- the harbinger of full-blown market rhetoric for health care in the 1980s and the managed care movement of the 1990s. She moved to Penn in 1979, with a break in the years 1991-96 when she served as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. She joined the emeritus faculty in 2002. Stevens' publications include books on the history of medical practice in England, the history of specialization in American medicine, the early implementation of Medicaid, physician migration policy and its implications, and the history of American hospitals. Her current research focuses on the formal organization of specialization in American medicine today, and the public roles and self-regulatory structures of the medical profession.