Introduction

The introduction explores the broader history of efficiency in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, placing the medical efficiency movement within this larger context. It offers a brief overview of the sheer variety of activities done in the name of efficiency in the early twentieth century and the ties that bound it to the burning questions of the day about American democracy, class and social mobility, the impact of industrialization, and the coming of a new and capitalist order. Medical efficiency is introduced as both a generative new lens for understanding the origins of modern American medicine as well as a unique case study through which readers may come to understand this complex movement and its early twentieth-century social, political, and cultural milieu.