ABSTRACT

One of the most striking changes which medicine has undergone in the course of the twentieth century is in its technologies. Government policies of the late 1970s and early 1980s had begun to problematize medicine’s reliance on new technologies and the nature of those technologies. Mounted both from within the medical profession itself as well as by critical observers, this radical discourse has come to draw on a variety of scholarly and social resources. Medical technology’s form and character arise from medicine’s focus on disease and pathophysiology as the arena in which the origins and solutions to human sickness are to be found. Growing in scale, hospital medicine became an increasing focus for entrepreneurial activity. Government policies, committed to enhancing the quality of health care, typically took for granted that the more sophisticated the technology the better the care.