The Creation of Partial Patients

Abstract

Armstrong describes the rise of a new mode of medical practice that he calls “surveillance medicine,” in the following terms: “Despite the obvious triumph of a medical theory and practice grounded in the hospital, a new medicine based on the surveillance of normal populations can be identified as emerging in the twentieth century.” Surveillance medicine gives rise to a novel and underexplored aspect of the long-standing tension between the different goals of clinical medicine and public health.