Technology, Health, and the Patient Consumer in the Twentieth Century

This book examines the little explored relationship between a variety of medical, informational, and health technologies and patients’ roles as consumers from the early twentieth century to the present. It shows how patients as consumers have shaped such technologies, and equally, how technology has had a lasting effect on ways of being a patient. -- .

Technology and consumerism are two characteristic phenomena in the history medicine and healthcare, yet the connections between them are rarely explored by scholars. In this edited volume, the authors address this disconnect, noting the ways in which a variety of technologies have shaped patients’ roles as consumers since the early twentieth century. Chapters examine key issues, such as the changing nature of patient information and choice, patients’ assessment of risk and reward, and matters of patient role and of patient demand as they relate to new and changing technologies. They simultaneously investigate how differences in access to care and in outcomes across various patient groups have been influenced by the advent of new technologies and consumer-based approaches to health. The volume spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spotlights an array of medical technologies and health products, and draws on examples from across the United States and United Kingdom.