Technological Medicine
The Changing World of Doctors and Patients

This book explores how the technologies of medicine are created and how society, patients, and practitioners respond to the problems and successes of their use.

Stanley Joel Reiser (Author)

9780521835695, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 August 2009

246 pages, 24 b/w illus. 2 tables
23.5 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.47 kg

'Reiser should be commended for his demonstration that technological advance throughout recent times has commonalities as well as unintended consequences. The funding of a Patient-Centred Outcomes Research Institute in the recently passed US health care legislation suggests that his conclusions regarding technological advance may find an ear. Reiser calls for a better understanding of medicine that goes beyond technology for its own sake, stronger relationships between patients and medical professionals in widening the vision of medical technology, and informed social policy that is built on this new vision.' Science

Advances in medicine have brought us the stethoscope, artificial kidneys, and computerized health records. They have also changed the doctor-patient relationship. This book explores how the technologies of medicine are created and how we respond to the problems and successes of their use. Stanley Joel Reiser, MD, walks us through the ways medical innovations exert their influence by discussing a number of selected technologies, including the X-ray, ultrasound, and respirator. Reiser creates a new understanding of thinking about how health care is practiced in the United States and thereby suggests new methods to effectively meet the challenges of living with technological medicine. As healthcare reform continues to be an intensely debated topic in America, Technological Medicine shows us the pros and cons of applying technological solutions health and illness.

1. Revealing the body's whispers: how the stethoscope transformed medicine
2. Enigmatic pictures: how patients and doctors encountered the X-ray
3. Life-saving but unaffordable: the improbable journey of the artificial kidney
4. Promising rescue, preventing release: the double edge of the artificial respirator
5. The quest to unify health care through the patient record
6. Putting technologies on trial: from bloodletting to antibiotics to the Oregon initiative
7. Amid the technological triumphs of disease prevention - where is health?
8. The technological transformation of birth
9. Governing the empire of machines.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], History of medicine [MBX], Social & political philosophy [HPS]