Technology, Health, and the Patient Consumer in the Twentieth Century - (Social Histories of Medicine) by Rachel Elder & Thomas Schlich (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book examines the little explored relationship between a variety of medical, informational, and health technologies and patients' roles as consumers from the early twentieth century to the present. It shows how patients as consumers have shaped such technologies, and equally, how technology has had a lasting effect on ways of being a patient.

Book Synopsis

Technology and consumerism are two characteristic phenomena in the history medicine and healthcare, yet the connections between them are rarely explored by scholars. In this edited volume, the authors address this disconnect, noting the ways in which a variety of technologies have shaped patients' roles as consumers since the early twentieth century. Chapters examine key issues, such as the changing nature of patient information and choice, patients' assessment of risk and reward, and matters of patient role and of patient demand as they relate to new and changing technologies. They simultaneously investigate how differences in access to care and in outcomes across various patient groups have been influenced by the advent of new technologies and consumer-based approaches to health. The volume spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spotlights an array of medical technologies and health products, and draws on examples from across the United States and United Kingdom.

From the Back Cover

Do technologies help, hinder or complicate patients' experiences? Do they increase or limit their access to care or multiply their medical and personal choices? How has technology shaped our roles as patients and health consumers and the growing conflation between them?

Technology, health and the patient consumer examines the little explored relationship between a variety of technologies and patients' roles as consumers from the early twentieth century to the present. It considers how the growth of technological devices and systems within hospitals, homes, and other care settings was entangled with a simultaneous expansion in consumerism in Western medicine. The book examines key issues, such as the changing nature of patient information and choice, patients' assessment of risk and reward, matters of patient role and of patient demand as they relate to new and evolving technologies. It simultaneously investigates how differences in access to care and in outcomes across various patient groups have been influenced by the advent of new technologies and consumer-based approaches to health.
Drawing on examples from the United States and United Kingdom, the volume spotlights an array of medical and informational technologies and health products in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as tampons, patient databases, new surgical techniques and tanning products. The chapters demonstrate how patients as consumers have shaped such technologies, and equally, how technology has had a lasting effect on ways of being a patient.

About the Author

Rachel Elder is Research Associate in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University
Thomas Schlich is James McGill Professor in the History of Medicine and Department Chair of the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University