Nancy Tomes. Remaking the American Patient

The introduction to Nancy Tomes’s Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers promises a work of scholarship that reveals just how and why American patients of the twentieth century evolved into consumers—that is to say, “shoppers” in search of value, quality, and service while on guard against the hazards of an unevenly regulated, profit-seeking medical industry—and why this evolution did so little to remedy the pervasive ills of American health care. In fact, Tomes’s tome (422 pages that take readers from the nineteenth century into the early twenty-first century) delivers much more than this. The book generously sketches out the relationship between twentieth-century medicine and the U.S. economy more broadly, and outlines how this relationship transformed not just patients’ perspectives of the medical field but the practice of medicine and the reputation of its core practitioners, doctors. In short, Remaking the American Patient is a book about how medicine was shaped by capitalism—modern consumer capitalism, specifically. As such, it lays the groundwork for a new field of inquiry at the intersection of the histories of American medicine and capitalism.

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