Through the lens of the physician-patient relationship, this article investigates the relationship between medicine’s history and its digital present. The rhetoric surrounding the introduction of new technologies into medicine today tends to emphasize that technology is disrupting relationships and that the doctor-patient bond represents a more “human” era of medicine that should be preserved. This article shows that material cultures have always shaped patient-physician relationships, using historical studies of pre-modern and modern Western European medicine. We examine three activities – recording, examining, and treating – in light of their historical antecedents, arguing that the concept of ‘human medicine’ is ever-changing: it is made up of social attributions of skills to physicians that have played out very differently throughout history.

More sophisticated accounts should acknowledge that medical objects and technologies are not the strange and disturbing ‘other’ in the medical encounter, but rather integral players in it, in contrast to idealized and simplified historical narratives that lament the loss of human relationships. ‘Things and humans are inseparably interwoven in mutually constitutive relationships,’ as Frank Trentmann put it (2009, 307). While the authors of a recent study claim that “the traditional dyadic dynamics of the medical encounter have been altered into a triadic relationship by introducing the computer into the examination room” (Assis-Hassid et al. 2015, 1), it appears that the dyadic relationship never existed.

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

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10912-021-09699-x

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.