Machines in medicine

Our problem, basically, is the impossibility of designing machines that in any way match the subtlety of living matter. We appreciate the inadequacy and we know that it is forced upon us by a secondhand technology -- the crumbs from the tables of other branches of science and engineering. By way of encouragement I will add that I do not intend to write the whole book in this negative tone -- which is really why I began it that way. When I later enthuse about some machine or other and point to its elaborate ingenuity (or to its beautiful simplicity) my enthusiasm is relative -- based in the 1960s. - p. 11.