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In Prescription TV, Joy V. Fuqua examines the use of television as a therapeutic device, focusing on the medium's introduction into hospitals in the late 1940s and 1950s. She describes how hospital administrators and designers have used television in their efforts to make the hospital space seem more inviting and home-like. Fuqua discusses the significance of architecture, design, and space. For instance, in selling television to hospitals, manufacturers' promotional materials specified where televisions should be placed in relation to viewers in particular spaces, such as patients' rooms.
In hospitals and in private homes, television contributed to the idea of the patient as healthcare consumer. Delving deeper into the relationship between health, media, and what she calls the consumer-patient, Fuqua analyzes the role of TV and, later, the Web, in making homes clearinghouses for medical information. Taking a Viagra ad campaign as a case study, she analyzes direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising and the ways that it has expanded television's role in the medical marketplace in recent years. On television and the Web, patients are encouraged to talk to their doctor about brand-name medications. Along with the many websites providing medical information, the market-driven pharmaceutical promotions so common on American television are redefining and redistributing medical knowledge and authority.
"Prescription TV is a beautifully written and persuasive account of television's medical applications at home and in the hospital over the decades. Joy V. Fuqua's prose moves deftly between individual case studies and critical analysis of the forces that have transformed TV viewers into patients and consumers. Medicine today is big business, and anyone interested in the way television structures power within the health industry should read this groundbreaking book." Anna McCarthy, author of The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America "After reading Prescription TV, you'll never watch ads for Viagra - or any other prescription drug - in the same way again. Joy V. Fuqua navigates the historical, material, and cultural dimensions of television's role in cultivating the modern consumer-patient. She demonstrates how television is implicated in professional and colloquial discourses of health, medicine, and consumer agency, and how it has reconfigured ideas about medical and therapeutic space in the hospital and the home." Mimi White, author of Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television
ISBN: 9780822351269
ISBN-10: 0822351269
Audience:
Professional
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 224
Published: 19th June 2012
Dimensions (cm): 22.9 x 15.2
x 2.8
Weight (kg): 0.304
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