Descartes's Legacy: A Theme Issue on Biomedical and Behavioral Technology

Abstract

Rend Descartes was surely very far from Ellen Koch's mind when she telephoned me, sometime in the winter of 1989, but her call set in motion a sequence of events that I think would have made the dour French philosopher smile. Ellen, who was then a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, had conceived the idea of organizing a session on the history of medical technology for the upcoming SHOT meeting in Sacramento. She had succeeded in enlisting three young scholars working in the field; would I be willing to comment on their papers? I recall responding enthusiastically. A year or so earlier I had begun the research on what I hope will someday be a history of prenatal diagnosis-the technological systems by which fetal conditions can be diagnosed in utero-and at the time of Ellen's call I was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by my material. When I began the research I had assumed that, because of the controversy surrounding recombinant DNA, the spectacular and often speculative growth of the biotechnology industry, and the recent explosive rise in technologyrelated health care costs, would be a vast literature out there on the history of medical technology-and that that literature would help me to find organizing principles for my work. By the winter of 1989, however, I had discovered that although were, as I expected, dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of scholarly studies of the economics and sociology of medical technology, very few of those studies were either organized historically or informed by the kinds of questions historians are most likely to ask. The history of medical technology, I was coming to realize, was something of an unplowed field in need of a bit of turning: a few seedlings had been started, but none had yet reached-how shall I put it?--paradigmatic fruition.