An essay from Harvard University provides context to the debate over mechanical ventilation for COVID-19 patients. The author argues that the good-faith debate that broke out over acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, and Covid-19 at the beginning of the pandemic was the product of increasing dependence on high technologies in the hospital. By learning the history of these technologies, clinicians can understand how diagnoses and treatments came to be, and what unhelpful, questionable, or obsolete assumptions those technologies carry with them. The essay is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.