Machines, Minds, and Medicine

As a historian of science, medicine, and technology and a practicing physician, my current research centers on communications technologies and the nature of medical thought (for both patients and practitioners). These talks are drawn from my current book project, The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).  The first talk focuses on patients, and explores how the development of wearable wireless and DIY technologies for transmitting (and stimulating) brain functions reshaped patient experience and patient agency in the 20^th century, especially around the contested definition of psychosis and the interface between neurology and psychiatry. The second talk focuses on physicians, and touches upon the role of algorithmic thinking in medical decision-making in postwar years, as early attempts at AI first modeled their decision processes after expert physicians (an origin of the “expert-systems” model of AI) and then became models for physicians to learn to think with as well.

Electronic Patients: The Wireless Brain
April 26, 2022

Electronic Providers: The Push-Button Physician
April 27, 2022