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

Abstract

Descartes’s Legacy: A Theme Issue on Biomedical and Behavioral Technology RUTH SCHWARTZ COWAN René 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 held; would I be willing to comment on their papers? I recall responding enthusiastically. A year or so earlier 1 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 recom­ binant DNA, the spectacular and often speculative growth of the biotechnology industry, and the recent explosive rise in technologyrelated health care costs, there 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 there 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 held 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. Dr. Cowan is guest editor of this special issue. She is professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and president of the Society for the History of Technology.© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3404-0008S01.00 721 722 Ruth Schwartz Cowan As a result, Ellen’s modest proposal pleased me in ways that she probably could not have anticipated. Commenting on papers can occasionally serve as a good way for a scholar to get her or his own thoughts in order. With any luck, I thought, I will be able to say something that the authors will find useful and, at the same time, come up with an organizing principle that will help me bring order to my own burgeoning file drawers of notes. As things turned out, I was—and SHOT was—very fortunate. The three papers that arrived on my desk in the fall of 1989 were very good indeed: so good, and so thought-provoking, that several people were inspired not long after the meeting concluded to suggest to the authors and to Bob Post that perhaps the time had come to do a special issue of Technology and Cidture on medical technology. There was only one problem with the plan. Two of the original three papers were easily categorized as being about a medical tech­ nology, but one was not. “Losing Touch: The Controversy over the Introduction of Blood Pressure Instruments into Medicine,” by Hughes Evans, and “Chiropractic and the Social Context of Medical Technology, 1895—1925,” by Steven C. Martin, were both about diagnostic instruments—in the first instance the wondrously named “sphygmomanometer,” and in the second instance, the slightly less tongue-twisting “neurocalometer.” “Standardizing the Subject: Ex­ perimental Psychologists, Introspection, and the Quest for a Techno­ scientific Ideal,” by Deborah J. Coon, was somewhat different, however—not about an artifact that acts as a diagnostic instrument but about human beings who act as diagnostic instruments, measuring and analyzing their own thought processes. When the referees concurred with my initial judgment, to wit that “Standardizing the Subject” was a valuable paper, Bob Post and I decided that it would be worth broadening the conceptual reach of...