ABSTRACT
A central question for the new world of medicine is whether we want medicine to be a rational, scientific, and orderly process. The new medicine aspires to these qualities. The new doctor is armed with new wonder drugs, new wonder statistics, and wonderful new analyses of cost-effectiveness and of the proper processes of rational decision making. There is a wonderfully clean and sterile hum to the modern hospital. Even in the intensive care units, calm efficiency pervades. Specialized teams draw blood, adjust ventilators, discuss the withdrawal of life support, and harvest organs for transplantation. The patients are abstracted into lab values, digital readouts, radiographic images, or moral categories.
