This book is concerned with describing the application of technological methods to medical
diagnosis and therapy. It is instructive to review its development through recorded history. It
is apparent that the fastest advances in the application of technology to medicine have
occurred in the 20th Century and with an increasing pace. The following paragraphs touch on
some events in this chain. We should recall that systematic technological assistance has only
recently been widely applied to medicine through engineering. An understanding of the
pathology which technology often helps to identify has largely been developed hand in hand
with its application. In these paragraphs, we identify a number of the technologically based
systems which are described more fully in the succeeding chapters: their descriptions here are
necessarily rather terse.