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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.
List of contents
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.
About the author
Stanley Joel Reiser, Clinical Professor of Health Care Sciences and of Health Policy at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, is known nationally and internationally for his scholarship and teaching in ethics, history, technology assessment, and health policy. Before coming to The George Washington University, he held teaching positions at Harvard University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He has written more than 120 books and essays. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, Hastings Center Report, Scientific American, and the New York Times.
Summary
This book explores how the technologies of medicine are created; how society, patients, and practitioners respond to the problems and successes of their use; and how this response changes them; in order to suggest fundamental ways to alter thinking and practice in health care and thereby more effectively meet the challenges of living with technological medicine.
