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9781478031604 Academic Inspection Copy

The Product of Medicine

How Efficiency Made American Health Care
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In The Product of Medicine, Caitjan Gainty traces the history of the early twentieth-century medical efficiency movement in the United States, restoring it as a significant driver of medicine's modernization while also revealing its broader significance as a cultural force shaping modern American life. Covering a range of efficiency's uses in medicine-from the assembly-line structure of the early Mayo Clinic and Henry Ford Hospital to the landmark Flexner Report and the prosecution of the American Medical Association as a monopoly-Gainty challenges long-standing presumptions about how medicine acquired power and prestige during the Progressive Era. Gainty demonstrates how, rather than as a result of pathbreaking scientific advance or the rise of professional organizations, medicine came to be understood as modern through the more prosaic processes of standardization and organization. In doing so, Gainty uncovers medical efficiency as not only a function of industrial capitalism but also a vehicle for balancing populist and autocratic tendencies to maintain a workable American democracy.
Caitjan Gainty is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at King's College, London.
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Product 17 2. The Factory 39 3. The Standard 63 4. The Labor 91 5. The Market 115 6. Monopoly 139 Afterword 163 Notes 169 Bibliography 199 Index 221
"What does the surgeon's table owe to the factory floor? Caitjan Gainty reveals this and much more in her subtle, surprising, and endlessly fascinating account of American medical practitioners' encounter with early twentieth-century industrial efficiency experts. Applying a historian's scalpel to the rationalizing but also egalitarian ambitions of the era when medicine modernized, she adroitly lays bare the tensions-past and present-of health care provision in a capitalist democracy." - Sarah E. Igo, author of (The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America) "In this fascinating and fabulous book Caitjan Gainty retells the story of US medical history through the lens of industrialization and the industrial logics that made American medicine modern. Impressively conceptualized, cogently argued, and beautifully written, this book will attract significant interest while making an important contribution to the field." - Joseph M. Gabriel, author of (Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry)
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