The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth (2022)
This gripping history shows how the electronic devices we use to access care influence the kind of care we receive.The Doctor Who Wasn’t There traces the long arc of enthusiasm for—and skepticism of—electronic media in health and medicine. Over the past century, a series of new technologies promised to democratize access to healthcare. From the humble telephone to the connected smartphone, from FM radio to wireless wearables, from cable television to the “electronic brains” of networked mainframe computers: each new platform has promised a radical reformation of the healthcare landscape. With equal attention to the history of technology, the history of medicine, and the politics and economies of American healthcare, physician and historian Jeremy A. Greene explores the role that electronic media play, for better and for worse, in the past, present, and future of our health. Today’s telehealth devices are far more sophisticated than the hook-and-ringer telephones of the 1920s, the radios that broadcasted health data in the 1940s, the closed-circuit televisions that enabled telemedicine in the 1950s, or the online systems that created electronic medical records in the 1960s. But the ethical, economic, and logistical concerns they raise are prefigured in the past, as are the gaps between what was promised and what was delivered. Each of these platforms also produced subtle transformations in health and healthcare that we have learned to forget, displaced by promises of ever newer forms of communication that took their place. Illuminating the social and technical contexts in which electronic medicine has been conceived and put into practice, Greene’s history shows the urgent stakes, then and now, for those who would seek in new media the means to build a more equitable future for American healthcare.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Joseph Fitsanakis;
(2020)
Redesigning Wiretapping: The Digitization of Communications Interception
(/isis/citation/CBB949296828/)
Thesis
Kim, Richard S.Y.;
(2010)
Cyber-Surveillance: A Case Study in Policy and Development
(/isis/citation/CBB001567169/)
Chapter
Mindell, David;
Segal, Jérôme;
Gerovitch, Slava;
(2003)
From Communications Engineering to Communications Science: Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union
(/isis/citation/CBB000301261/)
Book
Russo, Alexander;
(2010)
Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks
(/isis/citation/CBB001035568/)
Book
Keeling, Kara;
Kun, Josh;
(2012)
Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB001421306/)
Book
Ehrlich, Matthew C.;
(2011)
Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest
(/isis/citation/CBB001212490/)
Book
Colin B. Burke;
(2014)
Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss
(/isis/citation/CBB321840730/)
Chapter
Jacob Ward;
(2018)
Oceanscapes and Spacescapes in North Atlantic Communications
(/isis/citation/CBB968495914/)
Article
Mette Simonsen Abildgaard;
Lee Humphreys;
(July 2020)
Landline Natives: Telephone Practices since the 1950s as Innovation
(/isis/citation/CBB656803681/)
Book
Downey, Gregory J.;
(2011)
Technology and communication in American history: SHOT/AHA historical perspectives on technology, society, and culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001180004/)
Book
Eric Schaefer;
(2014)
Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB653578464/)
Thesis
Luke Stadel;
(2015)
Television as a Sound Medium, 1922-1994
(/isis/citation/CBB291048813/)
Article
Patton, Elizabeth;
(April 2019)
Where Does Work Belong? Home-Based Work and Communication Technology within the American Middle-Class Postwar Home
(/isis/citation/CBB146314393/)
Book
Luke Fernandez;
Susan J. Matt;
(2019)
Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter
(/isis/citation/CBB093866470/)
Book
Ariel Rogers;
(2019)
On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942
(/isis/citation/CBB835134951/)
Book
Lenthall, Bruce;
(2007)
Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001035573/)
Thesis
Peter Sachs Collopy;
(2015)
The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s
(/isis/citation/CBB972436764/)
Chapter
Blake, Art M.;
(2012)
Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio
(/isis/citation/CBB001421311/)
Book
James W. Cortada;
(2016)
All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870
(/isis/citation/CBB010653555/)
Chapter
Scott, D. Travers;
(2012)
Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films
(/isis/citation/CBB001421309/)
Be the first to comment!