Stanley J. Reiser, Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients

Extract

Technological Medicine has been published at a time when increased attention is put onto medical devices and technologies. Indeed, as the history of science and medicine has uncovered the role of tools, artisans and industrial production in the making of knowledge, an endeavour to question such themes in modern medicine and how it shaped the medical science and affected the therapeutic relationship between patients and medical practitioners must be welcomed. In this regard, the definition of medical technology has been considerably enlarged, not merely dealing with surgical and orthopaedic instrumentation but also with medical equipment at large for diagnosis, therapeutics and information recording.

In this field of research, Stanley Joel Reiser represents a path-breaker: as early as 1978, he published Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge University Press). For the past 30 years, he has reflected on the use of technologies in modern medicine, how they have been invented, promoted and put into use, as well as what it meant in terms of medical ethics: Technological Medicine condenses this long-time thinking. Rather than re-publishing the out-of-print Medicine and the Reign of Technology, Reiser chose to re-write it, simplifying some chapters, discarding others and writing new ones dealing with up-to-date public debates. In the end, the new bottle offers a mature wine.