Jeremy A. Greene Libros

"The Doctor who wasn't there traces the long arc of enthusiasm for-and skepticism of-electronic media for health and medicine, showing that the same challenges now facing telehealth and the use of electronic medical records can be found in the medical reception of the telephone in the late nineteenth century and the radio, television, and mainframe computer across the twentieth. Wielding a rich trove of archival materials, physician/historian Jeremy Greene explores the role that new electronic media play, for better and for worse, in the past, present, and future of American health. Today's telehealth devices are far more sophisticated than the hook-and-ringer telephones that became widespread by the 1920s, the FM radio technologies used to broadcast health information in the 1940s, the televisions used to pioneer telemedical evaluation in the 1950s, or the first full-scale attempts to establish electronic medical records in the mid-1960s. But the ethical, economic, and logistical concerns they raise are prefigured in these earlier episodes, as are the gaps between what was promised and what was delivered. Each of these platforms produced subtle transformations in health and healthcare that we have learned to forget, displaced by promises of ever newer communications platforms to take their place. When is telemedicine good enough, and when is it not? And how do the uses of telemedical technologies shape patient relationships with health care providers? Who benefits and who suffers when new technologies are adopted? And what do these communication technologies, whose promised revolutions have all failed, bring to our understanding of health and disease?"-- Provided by publisher

Rather, his provocative and comprehensive analysis sheds light on the increasing presence of the subjectively healthy but highly medicated individual in the American medical landscape, suggesting how historical analysis can help to address the problems inherent in the program of pharmaceutical prevention.

Generic drugs are now familiar objects in clinics, drugstores, and households around the world. We like to think of these tablets, capsules, patches, and ointments as interchangeable with their brand-name counterparts: why pay more for the same? And yet they are not quite the same. They differ in price, in place of origin, in color, shape, and size, in the dyes, binders, fillers, and coatings used, and in a host of other ways. Claims of generic equivalence, as physician-historian Jeremy Greene reveals, are never based on being identical to the original drug in all respects, but in being the same in all ways that matter. How do we know what parts of a pill really matter? Decisions about which differences are significant and which are trivial in the world of therapeutics are not resolved by simple chemical or biological assays alone. Questions of therapeutic similarity and difference are also always questions of pharmacology and physiology, of economics and politics, of morality and belief. Greene chronicles the social, political, and cultural history of generic drugs, narrating the evolution of the generic drug industry from a set of mid-twentieth-century "schlock houses" and "counterfeiters" into an agile and surprisingly powerful set of multinational corporations in the early twenty-first century. The substitution of bioequivalent generic drugs for more expensive brand-name products is a rare success story in a field of failed attempts to deliver equivalent value in health care for a lower price. Greene's history sheds light on the controversies shadowing the success of generics: problems with the generalizability of medical knowledge, the fragile role of science in public policy, and the increasing role of industry, marketing, and consumer logics in late-twentieth-century and early twenty-first century health care

A gripping historical drama charting one woman's dazzling trajectory from model to lover to artist, to a tragic figure in her own right.