The Afterword manifests the book’s quieter investment in introducing this newly focused history of early twentieth-century medicine and efficiency into our discussions of health care and its reform today. Taking apart efficiency and medicine in this way allows us to look “under the hood” of modern American medicine as well as industrialization, efficiency, standardization, and even to some degree the capitalism that these last elements have been caught up in historiographically. The afterword offers some preliminary thoughts on how this new history might shift our views in the present away from the polarized rhetoric that the American Medical Association in part is guilty of having introduced and toward a more contextualized, more complex, and richer notion of what the inheritances of this early-century history might be in medicine and beyond.
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