Article ID: CBB133774701

When Teleconferencing was the Future: The 1970 ‘Medizin Interkontinental’ Transmission and West German Medicine in the Space Age (2022)

unapi

Abstract In March 1970, the first ever medical teleconference connected U.S. aeromedical experts in Houston and San Antonio to an audience of 25,000 physicians in congress centres in West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. As this article shows, the ‘Medizin Interkontinental’ transmission was a costly demonstration of the latest developments in satellite telecommunications and projection technology as well as a stage for space-age visions of the future of medicine in the aftermath of the moon landing. Audio-visual and space technology became, at one at the same time, the medium and the message of medical futurity. As I argue, the teleconference was an audio-visual techno-spectacle that marked the culmination of the German medical community’s infatuation with futurology at the end of the 1960s, but it was also contingent on the concrete interests of the parties involved, which included the German Medical Association, medical futurologists, nasa, the U.S. Air Force, and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba. Decades before teleconferences and telemedicine entered day-to-day medicine, the convergence of new medical and media technology, changes in medical education, Cold War geopolitics, and pharmaceutical sponsorship created a brief glimpse of a technology-based future of medicine that fell apart once these constellations changed in the early 1970s.

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Authors & Contributors
Fernandez, Rodrigo
Emma Bedor Hiland
Heiner Kilian
Hendrikse, Reijer
Matt, Susan J.
Adriaans, Ilke
Concepts
Technology and culture
Communication technology
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Methods of communication; media
Technology
Internet
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
Places
United States
Germany
Eastern Europe
Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
Japan
France
Institutions
Smithsonian Institution
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