Nancy Tomes. Remaking the American Patient

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” opined President Donald J. Trump on February 28, 2017, as he weighed in on Congressional debates about health care and health insurance coverage. The new president was probably the only American who did not know that American health care is complicated—indeed, most Americans confess that they are very perplexed as to how to navigate the system. Nancy Tomes’s clearly written and very timely Remaking the American Patient contextualizes the complex history of American health care in the twentieth century. Tomes’s central thesis is that the culture of medicine, including the expectations of both patients and doctors, has been shaped by the context of modern consumer capitalism. By exploring this intertwined history, she uncovers why Americans came to assume that “new and improved” medicine is better than old frameworks, and how patients developed the expectation that “expense equals quality.” The current American health care debates loom large here, with Tomes asking penetrating questions like “why has shopping for particular diagnostic tests or treatments come to be likened to the hunt for the best automobile or flat-screen TV?” Tomes traces the answers to the early twentieth century, as modern marketing evolved together with medical innovation and health commercialism. The rise of consumer culture in the twentieth century—advertising, marketing, and commercialism—she argues, blurred distinctions between professionalism and commercialism, complicating what it meant to be both a “good patient” and a “good doctor.”

American medicine · Capitalism · Commercialism · Consumerism · Context (archaeology) · Family medicine · Health care · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine

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