The Crafting of Medicine in the Early Industrial Age

摘要

Current medicine is more or less synonymous with its technologies, from drugs to recording systems. In the past two decades, scholarship in medical sociology and STS has profoundly engaged with the shaping and use of technologies in a medical context and explored the ways by which they redefined medicine. With few exceptions, narratives of medical technologies rarely challenge the invention of the stethoscope as the origin of both technological medicine and technology-driven modern medicine.1 Focusing on a different time frame, this special issue offers a critical enquiry into the co-construction of medicine and technology in the early industrial age.