摘要：Those who appraise American health care as pre-eminent in the world invariably point to the widespread diffusion of technologies and the experts and health systems that use and house them as the foundation upon which the successes it claims rest. Centers that specialize in orthopedic, cardiac and cancer care and so forth, standing alone or embedded in hospitals, crowd the map of medical America. Specialties that govern such technologies now are the most sought after by medical students. But the ascendancy of technological medicine to the pinnacle of medical success has meant that nontechnological aspects of practice inevitably become less studied, valued and used. This consequence needs attention if we are to gain a wider and more realistic view of how American medicine should function and how to assess its quality. The best place to turn for this perspective is to medicine’s past and to a moment in time when perhaps the most significant technological invention of the diagnostic part of medicine was introduced and applied.
