Medicine and the Reign of Technology

Abstract

Technology is assuming an increasingly important role in medicine. How did this come about? Reiser here offers a dual approach: he discusses the origins and development of many technological advances (limiting himself, wisely, to diagnostic procedures and leaving therapy alone) and presents some of the socioeconomic effects that resulted therefrom. The two parts, however, do not entirely mesh. His account of the growth of technology concentrates on the 19th century and does not go beyond the threshold of the 20th. There is a weak transition in passing from early 20th century procedures to the altered socioeconomic relationships of the past 30 years. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the physician derived his information chiefly from external examination (and history). He gradually learned how to estimate what was going on inside the body. Reiser describes the development of various instruments, such as the stethoscope, that depended on sound, and various other

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