Conclusion

Abstract

AbstractThe conclusion follows the book’s central themes into twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western medicine. It considers a debate, which raged in the British Medical Journal during World War I, over the proper role of hourly timekeeping in the operating room. It also addresses twenty-first century developments in chronobiology and precision medicine. This conclusion thereby highlights continuties across millennia in how medical providers and researchers debate the relevance of daily timekeeping within their thought and practice, the contexts in which precision matters, the relative values of quantitative and qualitative forms of knowledge expression, and the tensions that can arise between the desires for standardization and personalization.