Colluding With the Decline of Continuity

“You can pretend to know, you can pretend to care, but you can’t pretend to be there.”1 For most of the 20th century, “being there” was a standard for family doctors in their communities and practices. General practitioners were physicians who went from house calls to nursing homes to offices to hospitals in the course of their everyday work. They knew the terrain of their communities. Persistence across place was an assumption and concerns about giving up some of that territory—specifically the hospital—were at the heart of the decades-long debate about creating family medicine as a specialty.