In The Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care, Caitjan Gainty offers an intelligent, well-researched, generally well-written, sometimes incomplete, and occasionally confusing account of efforts to modernize American medicine in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Gainty focuses on the introduction of “efficiency,” “process,” and “standardizing” perspectives to evaluate the “product of medicine” in several institutional, practice, and educational settings. By her examples she suggests that she’s exploring early twentieth century attempts by certain clear-thinking and courageous individuals (most of them physicians) to submit medical practice, institutions, and clinical outcomes to rigorous, objective, data-based effectiveness and Read more