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technology represented by the artificial respirator that could prolong dying or life without
cognition, they reached out to the ethical traditions of religion, medicine, and society for
help (Pius XII, pp. 501–504). Physicians particularly began to see that the ethical
problems to be solved in these crises were as great as or greater than the technical
problems of treatment. Other machines developed in this period posed a similar mix of
ethical and technical issues. The artificial kidney was created as a device for acute,
intermittent dialysis by Willem Kolff in The Netherlands in 1944 but it was introduced as
Schribner. The limited number of machines and personnel to run them led to moral
agonizing over developing criteria for selection. Technologies such as the artificial
kidney and the respirator have been criticized as offering expensive but partial solutions
The extraordinary and growing expense of the healthcare system that followed the
comprehensive biologic answers to problems such as organ failure. But in the twentieth
century, we have acquired few such complete technologies. One group, already
mentioned, is penicillin and other antibiotics, which offer total solutions, that also are
inexpensive and rapidly acting, to the problems of bacterial infection. A second generic
have in the twentieth century eradicated the first disease and almost wholly contained
the second.
The emerging field of genetic research promises fundamental solutions to a host of
disorders, with the prospect of their early detection and correction. Finally, the growing
ability to visualize the basic structures of the body through endoscopes and computer-
driven imaging machines such as the MRI and PET scans provides diagnostic
knowledge facilitating the use of therapeutic technologies that promise complete cures.
Indeed, genetic and imaging technologies have taken the anatomic concept of illness to
its ultimate terminus. To the question "Where is the disease?" the answer now can be