Technological medicine: the changing world of doctors and patients

certain species to cancer and metastases. Both concepts are key to the creation of new cancer treatments. Lastly, the book delves into how a mismatch of the modern environment from our evolutionarily ancestral environment explains many diseases of the industrial world such as diabetes, allergies, autoimmunity, and obesity. Evolutionary Medicine is intended for undergraduate, graduate, or medical school courses. It draws from fields as diverse as anthropology to molecular biology in order to illustrate the vast landscape of an organism in all its complexity. In contrast to the reductionist approach often taken to answer complex biological questions, much of the strength of the book derives from the authors' ability to step back and describe themes that are broadly gener-alizable. This alternative perspective allows for an innovative understanding of basic biological processes with profound translational potential. The striking simplicity of the author's overall thesis allows the book to address, in a novel light, questions as fundamental as " What is a pa-tient? " as well as " What is a disease? " Technological Medicine by Stanley Reiser is a very informative, reader-friendly, and engaging historical overview of the evolution of modern health care policies, advanced medical technologies, and how certain historical events and figures played into the development of those innovations and policies. The book consists of nine well-intertwined chapters. The text is peppered with anecdotal excerpts from various historical documents and provides illustrations depicting medical technologies as they were imagined throughout history. The author artfully bridges the technical peculiarities of medical technologies with specific historical events that helped spur their invention. Each chapter follows the same engaging recipe: first, it provides a detailed historical overview about what events preceded, sometimes accidental, sometimes painstakingly challenging; followed by an exploration of how lives of patients, prac-titioners' experience, and health care as a whole were influenced by the successes and pitfalls of their use; and finally, how the response to these technologies recreated the relationship between patients and doctors, increased awareness of health care policy flaws, and helped introduce ways to improve practice in health care. In the first third of the book, Reiser spends a great deal of time covering the evolution of technologies, from the stethoscope and the X-ray to an artificial kidney and respirators, exploring both unprecedented benefits for the patients as well as a plethora of unexpected medical, ethical , and legal plights for doctors and health care policy …