Book Notes

Henry Power. Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Rimes House, 2009. 193 pp. Ill. £50.00 (978-1-874317-02-9).

Experimental Philosophy, originally printed in London in 1664, is the only known publication of seventeenth-century physician and scientist Henry Power. Although copies may be found in the holdings of some libraries, a previous modern reprint is no longer in print. This 2009 photographic reproduction makes available Power's observations and experiments in microscopy, natural history, and anatomy, commenced in Cambridge and later continued in Halifax.

Stanley Joel Reiser. Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 229 pp. Ill. $30.00 (978-0-521-83569-5).

In this book, written for a "public, health professional, and health policy readership" (p. xiv), Stanley Joel Reiser explores how certain technologies of medicine are created, "how society, patients, and practitioners respond to the problems and successes of their use" (p. xiii), and how such responses change them. Chapters 1 through 4 discuss the creation of the stethoscope, X-ray, artificial kidney, and artificial respirator, respectively. Chapter 5 probes the events leading to the electronic health record, and Chapter 6 examines the "rise of scientific means to determine whether therapies are effective or not" (p. xiii). In the final three chapters, Reiser considers technologies to prevent disease, "the transformation of birth from a social to a technologically driven medical event" (p. xiii), and the "compelling influence" (p. xiii) that technology exerts on practice in health care.

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