New Books In Medicine

Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though they were misled by numbers intended to lend a modicum of certainty to the complex calculus of modern life. But while election predictions come and go, the “empire of chance” lays siege to more and more aspects of daily life, alongside increasing possibilities for technological intervention–nowhere, perhaps, is this more clear than in medicine. Robert Aronowitz’s Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is both a nuanced and accessible exploration of the historical transformation of risk in modern biomedicine. Through a series of case studies and broader reflections on the ways in which modern medicine has become “risky,” Aronowitz teases out salient features of an increasingly complex system of interventions and indicators. In the book, Aronowitz defines three key aspects of