Description
Book SynopsisMedical Technology and the Social: How Medical Technology is Impacting Social relations, Institutions, and Beliefs about what is Normal explores the intersection of society and medical technology to examine how medical technology impacts our day-to-day lives. The contributors examine a variety of technologies and their impact on the social world, from older technologies such as the use of fax machines in hospitals to cutting-edge technologies such as Bluetooth-enabled smart pills. Underlying each chapter is a consideration of what is “normal”, investigating such themes as power and social control, diffusion of technology, eco-crip theory, the changing role of medical expertise, the embodiment of the fetus in utero, the history of prosthetics, and how technology has reformed conceptions of a “normal” body.
Trade ReviewIn this book, Kate Burrows and her collaborators provide cutting-edge accounts regarding major developments in medical technologies ranging from cat scans to new reproductive techniques, to developments in pharmacology. It is essential reading for anyone interested in how sociocultural factors influence changes in medical technologies.
-- Allan V. Horwitz, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, Rutgers University
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Introduction
Kathryn Burrows
Part I: Technology Adoption, Diffusion, and Obduracy
1. Deconstructing Adoption and Use of Medical Technology: The Case of Two Imaging Technologies in India
Ankita Mukherjee and India Chakravarthi
2. Infrastructural Embeddedness and the Persistence of Fax in Australian Healthcare Contexts
Rowan Wilken and Jenny Kennedy
Part II: Envisioning the Body through Technology
3. The Fetal Scan Project
Anna Gonzalez Suero
4. The Alterlife of Disabled Fetal Imaginaries: Understanding Irradiation and Disability after New Reproductive Technologies
Misria Shaik Ali
5. Menstrual Futures: Medical Technologies’ Impact on Beliefs about “Normal” Bleeding
Amber Nicole Brooks
6. The Emporia of Aristotle: What Prosthetics Taught Us About the Human Body
Alan Hawk
Part III: Pharmaceutical interventions to the Social World
7. Technologies of Repair: Naloxone, Opioid Overdose Prevention, and the Social in the U.S. Southwest
Danielle Kabella
8 Abilify MyCite and the Social Control of Digital Pills
Kathryn Burrows
About the Contributors
