| Research Abstract |
Today in a hospital people encounter highly advanced science and technology. The X-ray and electrocardiograph, once regarded as high technologies, are now simply part of routine medical care. Patients are in contact with a number of highly advanced scientific innovations and newly devised machines and technologies, more so as computed axial tomography (CAT) scanners and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners have become indispensable tools for medical diagnosis.
It was post-WW II that American Medicine began to provide such a technology-oriented medical care in the hospital and to rely heavily upon instrumentation and pre-clinical examinations carried by laboratory technologies. To serve these purposes, doctors were required to collaborate with other scientific fields like physics, biology, chemistry and engineering. Biophysics, biochemistry, and genetics began to be seen as having an important contribution to make to medical care, and centralized institutions such as university hosp
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itals began to be demanded. To trace this transformation of American medicine, I will explore the case of the development and use for cancer therapy of the microwave linear accelerators (clinacs), a device co-invented by Henry Kaplan, Stanford professor of radiology, Edward Ginzton, the head of the Microwave laboratory at Stanford and a group of nuclear physicists of Stanford Hansen Laboratory. Longing for more research-oriented collaboration with other scientists and engineers of Stanford, Kaplan championed the transformation of Stanford School of Medicine into a more science-based medical center.
This research traces the history of clinacs from their development in the Stanford Radiology Department and also show how Kaplan's ambition was related to Stanford's establishment of basic medical departments such as Genetics and Biochemistry from the 1960s. By using Stanford University financial data and investigating the research funds medical professors and departments obtained from NSF and NIH, I am going to show their strategy to shape the university hospital into multi-disciplinary filed dominated by purely scientific endeavor. Less
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