What Is Medicine? And Where?

摘要

We assume that we know what medicine is. We associate it with the diagnosis and treatment of disease and with the skills of credentialed practitioners. We also associate it with a particular, almost sacred, space: the hospital. But this space and the technology it houses are novel in historical terms and are today unstable and perhaps unsustainable. Technology, demography, and policy have configured themselves in ways that destabilize our understandings of both medicine and the social and physical space it occupies. In the United States, Walmart and Walgreens provide immunizations and primary care; iPhones promise to function as otoscopes and ophthalmoscopes, and to provide blood sugar and blood pressure readings; and the experience of death itself is being removed from the hospital as hospice care becomes an accepted part of our social landscape.