Jeremy A. Greene, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine and holds the Elizabeth A. Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; his most recent book, Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicines, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Greene's first book, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease, was awarded the Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the Edward Kremers Prize by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. He received an MD and a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2005, finished a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women's Hospital in 2008, is board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians, and continues to practice primary care medicine in a community health center in East Baltimore.
Presentation Abstract
The Analog Patient: Towards a Media History of Medicine
What can the history of older technologies like the telephone and the television teach us about the future of digitally-medicated medicine? Today, new technologies like the smartphone, the electronic medical record, and the Fitbit are widely expected to revolutionize clinical care, public health research, and medical education. Yet the hopes and fears stirred by these visions of medicine’s digital future echo earlier concerns of social justice, health equity, and clinical ethics that were equally visible when older analog media were first introduced into medicine. This talk reframes current debates over the promise and perils of digital health by examining the continuity--and change--in the successive ethical challenges posed by a series of older "new media" in medicine from the late 19th century to the present.