The medical doctor and philosopher Stanley Joel Reiser, for example, has made a provocative case that the stethoscope, along with other medical technology, made physicians less dependent on (and ultimately less interested in) the subjective experiences of patients. “As the physician makes greater use of the technology of diagnosis,” he writes, “he perceives his patient more and more indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists. . . . These circumstances tend to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgment.”
