Abstract

This chapter explores the history of medical technology. Beginning with a discussion of the ancient and medieval distinction between medicine and surgery, it examines how, before the eighteenth century, doctors primarily obtained information from observation and from patients’ narrative accounts of illness; how, by the nineteenth century, these accounts came to be supplemented by the invention of such new technologies as the stethoscope; and how the proliferation of medical technology in the twentieth century led to both great advances and serious ethical, political, and economic questions. Then, with a focus on contemporary molecular biology, genetics, and biotechnology, it considers some of the promises and challenges of medical technology in the twenty-first century.