In Short Supply: Examining the Current Healthcare Supply Chain Crunch
During the days of the American Civil War, some commodities were hard to come by, such as material to make hundreds of thousands of military uniforms. To keep expenses low, Northern quartermasters ordered a material known as “shoddy.” It was a mishmash of discarded woolen rags mixed with new wool fibers, with the result being a low-quality material that often came apart after little wear. Our modern adjective, “shoddy,” comes from this 19th-century material. There are times when whole sectors…