Review by Choice Review
This ambitious review of recent technical shifts in health care asks how new ways of knowing the body have altered medicine's professional grip on the cultural imagination of health and disease. The authors (Univ. of York) take the measure of theories of innovation (chapters 1-2), then move to the heart of the matter--the assessment of claims about the "newness" of the "new" technologies and the extent of their transformative powers (chapters 3-6). The substantive chapters are built from sociologies and ethnographies of medicine and society, particularly work from England and North America. These chapters--insightful, provocative, tightly packed--are organized around areas of technological intervention (birth, death, upkeep, repair). The organizing frame conveys the key point: the temporal and spatial coordinates of the body and the life course have been radically reconfigured via diagnostic imaging, electronic record keeping, telemedicine, cross-species transplantation, reproductive cloning, genetic banking, and intensive or "end-stage" care. Whether the reconfigured body comes with a reconfigured moral, legal, or cultural self is uncertain. The contours of the person in late modern medicine, and in society at large, are not on view. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. B. Bianco independent scholar
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
