Medical Technology and Society by Joseph D. Bronzino, Vincent H. Smith, and Maurice L. Wade
	(Illus.) MIT Press 1990 (Sloan Nla Series) 571pp. 0262023008 Index

This is a wonderfully pedagogical book. It teaches us how to understand ourselves and our situation in the face of the modern phenomenon of "health." This "health," a product of a sophisticated health care system driven principally by technological advances and governed by a rule of scarcity, commands our attention. This book tells us how to attend to it. Each chapter is thorough and technically fairly sophisticated and yet clearly written for the unsophisticated but curious layperson. Besides instructing its readers in the technologies of medicine, this book also instructs us in the complementary technologies of the human sciences that medicine so desperately needs in these times. This is the first book I've seen that unashamedly makes it clear that economics and ethics are essential to the rationalization and justification of modern medicine.

--Contemporary Sociology, 20 (July 91), p. 619.