The Computer in the Clinic: Past Futures of Precision Medicine

• In Event: Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data - III

Abstract

This paper charts the promise of an earlier age of digital medicine with strong resonance to current projects in big data and precision medicine. Part of a larger project on the history of new media in medical practice, this paper revisits the introduction of the mainframe computers and other digital devices into medical practice from the late 1950s to the early 1970s as an earlier “big data” moment: as computers first entered hospitals and clinics their “giant electronic brains” promised to tailor individual diagnoses to individual patients at subtler and earlier stages of disease—using analytics of a scale far exceeding the mind of the individual doctor. Physicians, patients, engineers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers were alternately fascinated and repulsed by the rise of these screening protocols and algorithmic medicine, and found both hope and fear in the promise of precision. Combining approaches from the history of technology and media history, this paper will ask how digital media become substrates for speculative futures whose successes and failures are both easily forgotten once displaced in favor of yet newer devices.

Author

• Jeremy A Greene, Johns Hopkins University