Chapter 1 introduces the intersection of medicine and efficiency through the panic that ensued when medical practitioners were asked to answer a simple question: What does medicine produce? Probing this panic allows the chapter to consider what medical efficiency hoped to precipitate with this question: not an existential crisis but a methodological one. Without a product, there was nothing to aim efficiency interventions at and no way to measure whether those interventions had yielded improvements. Tracing this story through medicine introduces readers to how efficiency functioned and the values attendant to it. It also tracks how efficiency developed over time, overturning initial questions about what medicine produced within the decade to focus instead on the rationalization of process. The 1920 answer to the question of what medicine produced, at the efficiency-oriented Mayo Clinic, was a fully processed patient.
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