The Product of Medicine

In The Product of Medicine, Caitjan Gainty traces the history of the early twentieth-century medical efficiency movement in the United States, restoring it as a significant driver of medicine's modernization while also revealing its broader significance as a cultural force shaping modern American life. Covering a range of examples of efficiency's uses in medicine-from the assembly-line structure of the early Mayo Clinic and the Henry Ford Hospital to the landmark Flexner Report and the prosecution of the American Medical Association as a monopoly-Gainty challenges longstanding presumptions about how medicine acquired power and prestige during the Progressive era. Rather than a result of pathbreaking scientific advance or the rise of professional organizations, Gainty demonstrates how it is through the more prosaic processes of standardization and organization that medicine comes to be understood as modern. In doing so, Gainty uncovers medical efficiency as not only a function of industrial capitalism, but also as a vehicle for balancing populist and autocratic tendencies to maintain a workable American democracy.