Medical Technology

Abstract

Over the last 200 years medical technology has transformed the practice of medicine.’ The fumbling, inept, 18th-century physician has been replaced by assured teams of physicians, often operating their own corporate centers of medicine. Family medicine is now as likely to be practiced by board certified experts employed by corporate medical centers as by general practitioners using their own homes as offices. Discoveries in medicine have provided the physician with a range of strategies for controlling disease. Physicians now, as never before, have the final say concerning questions of health, and most patients readily agree to do whatever the physician recommends. It is apparent that medical discoveries have not only shifted the ways in which medicine is practiced, but also shifted the balance of power between patients and physicians in favor of physicians. This chapter is about these changes in social power and how medical technology caused them to occur.