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.
