Medical Futures Lab

When some doctors in Paris starting making movies of their surgeries in the early twentieth century, they galvanized forward-thinking American physicians to try making their own medical motion pictures when they got back home. The Parisian surgeons used their films like athletes do now, to study and improve their performance. (Remember, this was before anesthesia and antisepsis had attained the life-saving sophistication they have today – “faster” was the closest to “safer” they could get.)

What the American doctors found, however, was that the medical establishment had serious reservations about this new-fangled technology and its association with the “lower classes.” Much like the current decade-plus lag in adoption of new medical technologies, medical motion pictures had to wait about 15 years to gain traction. Eventually, movies were widely embraced in medical education, and they still are today, in digital form.

Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century, when closed-circuit television seemed to offer a new and improved form of communication and teaching. Unlike the previous resistance, this time, the medical establishment was at the front of the line, begging for government grants to try to make this new technology useful for training new physicians. Had medicine become a driver of innovation? And if so, why then, but not fifty years before?

There’s no magic answer – any real explanation would be long and complex, but the question is still worth asking: why does medicine sometimes embrace new forms of communication that might disrupt traditional knowledge hierarchies, while at other times everyone has their head in the sand? Where is medicine today, in terms of the prevalent attitude toward mobile, social, personalized media platforms? And where should we look for change?