Description
Book SynopsisTracing the history of television as a therapeutic device, Joy V. Fuqua describes how TVs came to make hospitals seem more like home and then "medicalized" the modern home several decades later.
Trade Review"
Prescription TV is a beautifully written and persuasive account of television’s medical applications at home and in the hospital over the decades. Joy V. Fuqua's prose moves deftly between individual case studies and critical analysis of the forces that have transformed TV viewers into patients and consumers. Medicine today is big business, and anyone interested in the way television structures power within the health industry should read this groundbreaking book."—
Anna McCarthy, author of
The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America"After reading
Prescription TV, you’ll never watch ads for Viagra—or any other prescription drug—in the same way again. Joy V. Fuqua navigates the historical, material, and cultural dimensions of television’s role in cultivating the modern consumer-patient. She demonstrates how television is implicated in professional and colloquial discourses of health, medicine, and consumer agency, and how it has reconfigured ideas about medical and therapeutic space in the hospital and the home."—
Mimi White, author of
Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television“Overall,
Prescription TV makes a valuable addition to Television Studies and the growing body of health communication literature. Fuqua successfully brings attention both to the materiality and discursibity of television, without privileging discursive constructs and framing television as a mere conduit for ideology. In so doing, she reminds us that in a society where popular media deeply penetrates everyday life, health becomes both a discursive construct and a social practice we must constantly engage with.” -- Yukari Seko * Canadian Journal of Communication *
“This study will be useful primarily for those involved in health care—for example, marketers and publicists, rehabilitation personnel, and health communicators—and those interested in the intersection of media studies and other disciplines. Summing Up: Recommended.” -- R. Ray * Choice *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Television, Hospital, Home 1
1. Convalescent Companions: Hospital Entertainment before Television 23
2. Television Goes to the Modern Hospital 49
3. Positioning the Patient: The Spatial Therapeutics of Hospital Television 71
4. Television in and out of the Hospital: Broadcasting Directly to the Consumer-Patient 93
5. Mediated Agency: Consumer-Patients and Pfizer's Viagra Commercials 115
Conclusion. Our Bodies, Our (TV) Selves 141
Notes 155
Selected Bibliography 187
Index 197
