Health
See also: List of hospitals in Massachusetts, Massachusetts health care reform, and Governorship of Mitt Romney#Health careMassachusetts generally ranks highly among states in most health and disease prevention categories. In 2009, the United Health Foundation ranked the state as third healthiest overall. However, the study also pointed to several areas in which Massachusetts ranked below average, such as the state's rate of binge drinking, which was the 11th highest in the country. Massachusetts has the most doctors per 100,000 residents, the second lowest infant mortality rate, and the lowest percentage of uninsured residents (for both children as well as the total population). According to Businessweek, commonwealth residents have an average life expectancy of 78.4 years, the fifth longest in the country. 37.2% of the population is overweight and 21.7% is obese, and Massachusetts ranks sixth highest in the percentage of residents who are considered neither obese nor overweight (41.1%).
The nation's first Marine Hospital was erected by federal order in Boston in 1799. The Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine lists a total of 132 hospitals in the state. According to rankings by US News & World Report, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston is the third best overall hospital in the nation; the hospital also ranked first in psychiatry. Massachusetts General was founded in 1811 and serves as the largest teaching hospital for nearby Harvard University.
Other teaching and medical institutions affiliated with Harvard include Brigham and Women's Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, among others. Boston is also the location of New England Baptist Hospital, Tufts Medical Center and Boston Medical Center, the latter of which is the primary teaching hospital for Boston University. The University of Massachusetts Medical School is located in Worcester. The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences has campuses in both Boston and Worcester.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Massachusetts
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Men’s hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“To speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)