The place of technology in modern societies is a subject of continuing controversy. Key issues include not only the impact of technology on daily life but also the need to control the development and uses of technological innovations so that they benefit all sectors of society.
12. Science, Technology and Society: The Case of Medical Technology
Throughout most of human history, limitations on food production, together with lack of medical knowledge, have placed limits on the size of population. Dreadful diseases like the bubonic plague have actually reduced populations. In England the plague, known as the Black Death, was responsible for a drastic drop in the population in 1348 and for the lack of population growth in the seventeenth century. In 1625 more than 35,000 residents of London died of the plague. Smallpox and dysentery have had similar, though less dramatic, effects.
Until relatively recently physicians were powerless either to check the progress of disease or to prolong life. In fact, they often did more harm than good—their remedies were more harmful than the illnesses they were intended to cure. As Lewis Thomas has stated, “Bleeding, purging, cupping, the administration of infusions of every known plant, solutions of every known metal, every conceivable diet including total fasting, most of these based on the weirdest imaginings about the cause of the disease, concocted out of nothing but thin air-this was the heritage of medicine up until a little over a century ago.”
Thomas’s point is that the nineteenth century, when scientists finally began to understand the nature of disease, physicians based their treatments on folklore and superstition. In fact, with few exceptions the practice of healing, like many other aspects of science, was closely linked to religion. In ancient Greece people who suffered from chronic illnesses and physical impairments would journey to the temple of Asclepius, the god of healing, in search of a cure. Even today pilgrims still travel to the cathedral at Lourdes in France in the belief that they may be cured of blindness, paralysis, or leprosy. Not until Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and other researchers developed the germ theory of disease did medicine become fully differentiated from religion. Their discoveries, together with progress in internal medicine, pathology, the use of anesthesia, and surgical techniques, led to the twentieth-century concept of medicine as a scientific discipline.
During the nineteenth century scientific research resulted in the discovery of the causes of many diseases, but at first this progress led physicians to do less for their patients rather than more: They began to allow the body’s natural healing processes to work and ceased to engage in damaging procedures like bloodletting. At the same time, they made major strides toward improving public-health practices. They learned about hygiene, sterilization, and other basic principles of public health, especially the need to separate drinking water from waste water. These innovations, which occurred before the development of more sophisticated drugs and medical technologies, contributed to a demographic revolution that is still under way in some parts of the world. Suddenly rates of infant mortality decreased dramatically, births began to outnumber deaths, and life expectancy increased. This change resulted not from the highly sophisticated techniques of modern medicine but largely from the application of simple sanitation techniques and sterilization procedures. In fact, these simple technologies have had such a marked effect on infant survival that the rate of infant mortality in a society is often used as a quick measure of its social and economic development.
In sum, as medical science progressed toward greater understanding of the nature of disease and its prevention, new public-health and maternal-care practices contributed to rapid population growth，in the second half of the nineteenth century, such discoveries as antiseptics and anesthesia made possible other life-prolonging medical treatments. In analyzing the effects of these technologies, sociologists ask how people in different social classes gain access to them and how they can be more equitably distributed among the members of a society. The ways in which medical technologies have been institutionalized in hospitals and the medical profession are a central focus of sociological research on these questions. 感谢您阅读《ScienceandTechnolo 》一文，出国留学网(liuxue86.com)编辑部希望本文能帮助到您。
