Biomedical Platforms: Technology in Modern Science

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Historians of medicine have often analysed the introduction of technology into medical settings from a somewhat romanticized perspective, focusing upon the doctorpatient relationship. In ancient times, so the story goes, physicians and patients shared a world of symbols and meanings, which enabled them to explore disease and illness from a consensual perspective. With the introduction of pathological anatomy, however, physicians located disease in lesions in the organs of the body, and the patient-as-a-person gave way to the view of patients as collections of diseased organs. With the advent of laboratory medicine, physicians focused upon blood samples or medical specimens from the body of their patients. The sick person had disappeared almost completely.1 Viewed from this perspective, the history of medical technology is a story of alienation, as patients are separated from those who would cure them. Apart from its implicit pessimism, this analysis is non-specific: all technological innovations are analysed in the same way. It therefore fails to provide satisfactory tools to analyse the role of technology in medicine. The main strength of the book under review lies in its attempt to do just this. Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio introduce an analytical framework based upon the emergence since the Second World War of what they call 'biomedical platforms'. The authors define these platforms as specific constellations of biomedical enti-