Technology and Medical Practice : Blood, Guts and Machines

What happens to the patient in a technologized medical environment? How are doctors', nurses' and medical scientists' practices changed when artefacts are involved? This book addresses these developments and dilemmas, focusing on various practices with technologies within hospitals and sociotechnical systems of care.

The advanced technologies being used in diagnosis and care within modern medicine, whilst supporting and making medical practices possible, may also conflict with established traditions of medicine and care. What happens to the patient in a technologized medical environment? How are doctors'', nurses'' and medical scientists'' practices changed when artefacts are involved? How is knowledge negotiated, or relations of power reconfigured? Technology and Medical Practice addresses these developments and dilemmas, focusing on various practices with technologies within hospitals and sociotechnical systems of care. Combining science and technology studies with medical sociology, the history of medicine and feminist approaches to science, this book presents analyses of artefacts-in-use across a variety of settings within the UK, USA and Europe, and will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology alike.