Remaking the American Patient
How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients Into Consumers
The University of North Carolina Press · Print & ebook · January 11, 2016
In a work that spans the twentieth century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular — and largely unexamined — idea that in order to get good health care, people must learn to shop for it.
We earn from qualifying purchases.
- Who it’s for
- Nancy Tomes traces how medicine and consumer culture developed together across twentieth-century America.
- Themes
- Medicine and consumer culture, Advertising in health care, Patient identity
- Genres
- Medical History, 20th-Century America, Health Care Policy
Nearest books
Matched by what the books are about, then ordered by what their readers also loved.
An American SicknessElisabeth Rosenthal69% matchShares Health Care Policy
Overdosed AmericaJohn Abramson63% matchShares Health Care Policy
The Great ShadowSusan Wise Bauer62% matchShares Medical History
Random Acts of MedicineAnupam B. Jena, Christopher Worsham61% match
Bad InfluenceDeborah Cohen, Blackstone Publishing60% match
Start with three books, and this one can be the first.
Members get a new edition every morning: a route out from their books to essays, research and talks, with the reason for each.
Start with this bookAbout this book
In a work that spans the twentieth century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular — and largely unexamined — idea that in order to get good health care, people must learn to shop for it. Remaking the American Patient explores the consequences of the consumer economy and American medicine having come of age at exactly the same time.
Continue reading
Tracing the robust development of advertising, marketing, and public relations within the medical profession and the vast realm we now think of as “health care,” Tomes considers what it means to be a “good” patient. As she shows, this history of the coevolution of medicine and consumer culture tells us much about our current predicament over health care in the United States. Understanding where the shopping model came from, why it was so long resisted in medicine, and why it finally triumphed in the late twentieth century helps explain why, despite striking changes that seem to empower patients, so many Americans remain unhappy and confused about their status as patients today.
Medicine Meets Consumer Culture
Nancy Tomes traces how medicine and consumer culture developed together across twentieth-century America.
Come here for
- The growth of advertising, marketing, and public relations in medicine
- A history of the patient-as-consumer idea
Expect
- The origins and resistance of the medical shopping model
- An account of its late-twentieth-century triumph
Where it sits
| Medical History | 85% |
|---|---|
| 20th-Century America | 53% |
| Health Care Policy | 23% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- 20th-Century America
- Health Care Delivery
- Health Policy
- Authors
- Nancy Tomes
- Publisher
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Published
- January 11, 2016
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Medicine and consumer culture · Advertising in health care · Patient identity
- Reading lane
- 20th-Century America