Article ID: CBB632264926

Computerizing Diagnosis: Keeve Brodman and the Medical Data Screen (2019)

unapi

In 1947, the Cornell psychiatrist Keeve Brodman and a handful of colleagues began developing what would become one of the most widely used health questionnaires of its time—the Cornell Medical Index (CMI). A rigidly standardized form, the CMI presented 195 yes-no questions designed to capture the health status of “the total patient.” Over the following decades, Brodman’s project of standardizing medical history taking gradually evolved into a project of mathematizing and computerizing diagnosis: out of the CMI grew the Medical Data Screen (MDS), one of the first computerized methods of deriving diagnoses from patient data. This essay follows the life course of these tools through the second half of the twentieth century. It argues for a genealogy of biomedical computing and computerized diagnosis that takes more seriously the continuities between computer-based digital practices and paper-based analog ones. The computerized MDS evolved from, and rested upon, paper data practices associated with questionnaires and surveys. The interlocking histories of the CMI and the MDS prompt a reconsideration of the material and temporal parameters within which the history of computerized medicine has conventionally been understood.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB632264926/

Similar Citations

Article Emily Stark; Jeremy Pitt; Alfian Nur Wicaksono; Kristina Milanovic; Victoria Lush; Stephen Hoover; (December 2018)
Odorveillance and the Ethics of Robotic Olfaction

Book Parthasarathy, Shobita; (2007)
Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care

Thesis Whitfield-Spinner, Linda; (2011)
A History of Medicine and the Establishment of Medical Institutions in Middlesex County, New Jersey that Transformed Doctor and Patient Relationships during the Early Twentieth Century

Book Rebekah Lee; (2021)
Health, Healing and Illness in African History

Article Emily Stark; Stephen Hoover; Alexandra DeCesare; Elan Barenholtz; (December 2018)
Medicine Has Gone to the Dogs: Deep Learning and Robotic Olfaction to Mimic Working Dogs

Book Ericka Johnson; (2021)
A Cultural Biography of the Prostate

Article Godderis, Rebecca; (2013)
A Tricky Object to Classify: Evidence, Postpartum Depression and the DSM-IV

Article Peter Murray Jones; (2021)
Early Franciscans in England: Sickness, Healing and Salvation

Article Madeleine Mant; (2020)
Inpatients at the St. John’s General Hospital: Morbidity in Late 19th-Century Newfoundland and Labrador

Book Michael Stolberg; (2021)
Learned Medicine and Everyday Medical Practice in the Renaissance

Article Dolan, Brian; Tillack, Allison; (2010)
Pixels, Patterns and Problems of Vision: The Adaptation of Computer-Aided Diagnosis for Mammography in Radiological Practice in the U.S.

Article Close-Koenig, Tricia; (2013)
Histopathology Slides from Medical Research to Medical Practice in Interwar Strasbourg

Article Enrique Wulff; (2023)
Clinical Diagnosis and Cancer Probe: A History of Unity and Mass Migration

Article Barbara Schildkrout; (2023)
What caused Joan of Arc’s neuropsychiatric symptoms? Medical hypotheses from 1882 to 2016

Book Wright, David; (2011)
Downs: The History of a Disability

Article Löwy, Ilana; (2013)
Prenatal Diagnosis and the Transformation of the Epistemic Space of Human Heredity

Article Murphy, Michelle; (2000)
The “Elsewhere within Here” and Environmental Illness; or, How to Build Yourself a Body in a Safe Space

Article Melling, Joseph; (2010)
Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt? Experts, Lay Knowledge, and the Role of Radiography in the Diagnosis of Silicosis in Britain, c. 1919--1945

Article Mauro Capocci; (2017)
Regimen Strikes Back. Diagnosis, Genes and the Patient

Article Kurcgant, Daniela; Ayres, José Ricardo de Carvalho Mesquita; (2011)
Crise não epiléptica psicogênica: história e crítica de um conceito

Authors & Contributors
Emily N. Stark
Stephen Hoover
Ayres, José Ricardo de Carvalho Mesquita
Capocci, Mauro
Close-Koenig, Tricia
Dolan, Brian P.
Journals
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
Medicina nei Secoli - Arte e Scienza
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Publishers
MIT Press
Bloomsbury Academic
Oxford University Press
Drew University
De Gruyter Oldenbourg
Concepts
Diagnosis
Medicine
Health care
Disease and diseases
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Patients
People
Cohnheim, Julius Friedrich
Down, John Langdon Haydon
Virchow, Rudolf Carl
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
19th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Medieval
Places
United States
Great Britain
Spain
England
Newfoundland (Canada)
Africa, Sub-Sahara
Institutions
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment