The Product of Medicine Audiobook By Caitjan Gainty cover art

The Product of Medicine

How Efficiency Made American Health Care

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The Product of Medicine

By: Caitjan Gainty
Narrated by: Kristin Aikin Salada
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In The Product of Medicine, Caitjan Gainty traces the history of the early twentieth-century medical efficiency movement in the United States, restoring it as a significant driver of medicine’s modernization while also revealing its broader significance as a cultural force shaping modern American life. Covering a range of efficiency’s uses in medicine—from the assembly-line structure of the early Mayo Clinic and Henry Ford Hospital to the landmark Flexner Report and the prosecution of the American Medical Association as a monopoly—Gainty challenges long-standing presumptions about how medicine acquired power and prestige during the Progressive Era. Gainty demonstrates how, rather than as a result of pathbreaking scientific advance or the rise of professional organizations, medicine came to be understood as modern through the more prosaic processes of standardization and organization. In doing so, Gainty uncovers medical efficiency as not only a function of industrial capitalism but also a vehicle for balancing populist and autocratic tendencies to maintain a workable American democracy.

The book is published by Duke University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2025 Duke University Press (P)2025 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

“Endlessly fascinating account of American medical practitioners’ encounter with early twentieth-century industrial efficiency experts.” (Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen)

“Fascinating and fabulous book..beautifully written...an important contribution to the field.” (Joseph M. Gabriel, author of Medical Monopoly)
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