Medical Technologies Past and Present: How History Helps to Understand the Digital Era

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between medicine’s history and its digital present through the lens of the physician-patient relationship. Today the rhetoric surrounding the introduction of new technologies into medicine tends to emphasize that technologies are disturbing relationships, and that the doctor-patient bond reflects a more ‘human’ era of medicine that should be preserved. Using historical studies of pre-modern and modern Western European medicine, this article shows that patient-physician relationships have always been shaped by material cultures. We discuss three activities – recording, examining, and treating – in the light of their historical antecedents, and suggest that the notion of ‘human medicine’ is ever-changing: it consists of social attributions of skills to physicians that played out very differently over the course of history.