The Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781478028420)

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 examples of efficiency's uses in medicine--from the assembly-line structure of the early Mayo Clinic and the Henry Ford Hospital to the landmark Flexner Report and the prosecution of the American Medical Association as a monopoly--Gainty challenges longstanding presumptions about how medicine acquired power and prestige during the Progressive Era. Rather than a result of pathbreaking scientific advance or the rise of professional organizations, Gainty demonstrates how through the more prosaic processes of standardization and organization medicine came to be understood as modern. In doing so, Gainty uncovers medical efficiency as not only a function of industrial capitalism but also as a vehicle for balancing populist and autocratic tendencies to maintain a workable American democracy.

Author: Caitjan Gainty
ISBN-10: 1478028424
ISBN-13: 9781478028420
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/08/2025
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.26lbs