The Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care

In The Product of Medicine, Caitjan Gainty traces the history of the early twentieth-century medical efficiency movement in the United States, restoring it as a significant driver of medicine’s modernization while also revealing its broader significance as a cultural force shaping modern American life. Covering a range of efficiency’s uses in medicine--from the assembly-line structure of the early Mayo Clinic and Henry Ford Hospital to the landmark Flexner Report and the prosecution of the American Medical Association as a monopoly--Gainty challenges long-standing presumptions about how medicine acquired power and prestige during the Progressive Era. Gainty demonstrates how, rather than as a result of pathbreaking scientific advance or the rise of professional organizations, medicine came to be understood as modern through the more prosaic processes of standardization and organization. In doing so, Gainty uncovers medical efficiency as not only a function of industrial capitalism but also a vehicle for balancing populist and autocratic tendencies to maintain a workable American democracy.

Caitjan Gainty is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at King’s College, London.