The Analog Patient: Towards a Media History of Medicine
What can the history of older technologies like the telephone and the television teach us about the future of digitally-medicated medicine? Today, new technologies like the smartphone, the electronic medical record, and the Fitbit are widely expected to revolutionize clinical care, public health research, and medical education. Yet the hopes and fears stirred by these visions of medicine’s digital future echo earlier concerns of social justice, health equity, and clinical ethics that were equally visible when older analog media were first introduced into medicine. This talk reframes current debates over the promise and perils of digital health by examining the continuity--and change--in the successive ethical challenges posed by a series of older "new media" in medicine from the late 19th century to the present.