Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers
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Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

by Nancy Tomes

Overview

In a work that spans the twentieth century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular--and largely unexamined--idea that in order to get good health care, people must learn to shop for it. Remaking the American Patient explores the consequences of the consumer economy and American medicine having come of age at exactly the same time. Tracing the robust development of advertising, marketing, and public relations within the medical profession and the vast realm we now think of as "health care," Tomes considers what it means to be a "good" patient. As she shows, this history of the coevolution of medicine and consumer culture tells us much about our current predicament over health care in the United States. Understanding where the shopping model came from, why it was so long resisted in medicine, and why it finally triumphed in the late twentieth century helps explain why, despite striking changes that seem to empower patients, so many Americans remain unhappy and confused about their status as patients today.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469622781
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 01/06/2016
Series: Studies in Social Medicine
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: NOOK Book
Pages: 560
File size: 5 MB

About the Author

Nancy Tomes is professor of history at Stony Brook University and author of The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A superb book! By closely looking at the business of the doctor's office and the drug store over the twentieth century, Nancy Tomes shows how American medicine has become what it is today and why, despite a century of reforms made in the patient's interest, patients now constantly sign consent forms and still wish their doctors talked to them more. Remaking the American Patient is beautifully written and essential to understanding the current predicament of medical care in America.—Leslie J. Reagan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and author of Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America

Christopher Crenner University of Kansas Medical Center

No historian other than Nancy Tomes could have succeeded so admirably in tracing the complicated path of medical consumerism through the major political and social developments of the twentieth century. A novel and highly readable account of the rise of the patient-consumer in the United States, Remaking the American Patient defines a new area of inquiry.

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