Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 by Gregory A. Waller

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 771 specific clinical conditions. Howell ties this evolution, in part, to phy­ sicians’ traditional familiarity with the test, to the increased precision and scope of the technique, and to simultaneous reforms in medical education that emphasized laboratory-based medicine. Howell makes plain that the utilization of technology by physi­ cians was a socially negotiated process and that tensions often devel­ oped over its adoption. X rays were initially seen as a medical curios­ ity rather than a diagnostic and therapeutic tool. It took more than two decades after both hospitals purchased x-ray equipment before physicians began to use it routinely even for fractures. Some physi­ cians resisted the introduction of medical technologies, such as blood tests to evaluate appendicitis, because they feared that their use might devalue the status of physicians whose expertise lay in clinical skills rather than in technical ones. Howell also found re­ gional differences in the application of technologies—a finding that underscores the importance of analyzing technology within a social context. For example, at Pennsylvania Hospital women were signifi­ cantly less likely than men to receive an x ray, while the opposite was true at New York Hospital. Local medical culture and experi­ ences likely account for the variation. The use of patient records is the greatest strength of Howell’s book. It allows him to look beyond physical artifacts as causal agents in shaping clinical practice at the turn of the century to focus on the way physicians made choices about the use of particular tests in caring for individual patients. Howell successfully describes the im­ pact of medical technologies on physicians’ work. However, despite his intention of “shifting the frame of reference away from the tech­ nology and toward the patient” (p. 16), the experiences of patients with these practices are disappointingly muted. Nonetheless, Joel Howell has written an important book that provides new insights about the relationship among technology, hospitals, and medical care. Vanessa Northington Gamble Dr. Gamble is director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Medi­ cine and associate professor of the History of Medicine and Family Medicine at the University ofWisconsin—Madison. She is the author of Making A Placefor Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930. By Gregory A. Waller. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+342; illustrations, notes, index. $49.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). This book discusses the history and social interaction of commer­ cial entertainment, film exhibition, and moviegoing at the turn of the century, in the social context of Lexington, Kentucky. As a case 772 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE study its conceptual framework places these historical factors squarely within the broader field of the cultural history of film, while reflecting upon many theories of earlier works that focused upon the history of cinema and popular culture. Gregory A. Waller com­ pares and contrasts these earlier findings, from differing geographic regions, with those observations he has drawn from a textual analysis of Lexington’s newspapers and other printed materials. From this evidence, Waller’s research suggests a uniquely Southern regional and biracial community dynamic that shaped the promotion, exhibi­ tion, and reception of commercial entertainment and film over time. This is all played out as the book traces the transformation of everyday American life and simultaneously tracks the evolution of commercial entertainment from a local to a more corporate and national entity. Of particular interest to Waller are: technology; live entertainment; business aspects of entertainment; audience partici­ pation and reaction at a biracial level; transitions from local to na­ tional marketing and monopoly control, regulation, race, war, the “Jazz Age,” the legal enforcement of monopoly and regulation of individuals rights, and the advent of sound recording and its imme­ diate and future impact upon society. Most importantly, with regards to film history, the book looks at the emergence of film culture in the Southern context. The author discusses the various forms of entertainment with which film inter­ acted, paying special attention to the means by which it finally be­ came the dominant entertainment medium...