“all new media deal in futures” -Jeremy Greene “automation is the dream of autonomy” -Hannah Zeavin It was at once an odd experience and an exhilarating one. Sitting at the edge of the sofa, I leaned over towards the coffee table to turn on my laptop and open the required application. I waited, intermittently checking […]
Hanna Zeavin’s The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, and Jeremy A. Greene’s The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth, are both histories of technology and medicine that question the centrality of the expert as the deciding factor in the success or failure of medical technologies. In Zeavin’s book, the […]
To read these two brilliant books side by side is an exhilarating experience—they not only offer new historical and theoretical insights into the role of media in clinical care, but they point towards unique (and uniquely thorny) historiographic questions. For as these media wended their way through medical and therapeutic treatments, they also left peculiar […]
The origins of The Doctor Who Wasn’t There are inescapably tangled with The Distance Cure—tangled in cords of telephone wires. The telephone was both the subject and object and medium of our meeting. I had been noticing the iterative updates to the electronic health record in the community health center where I practiced, watching my […]
Letters always, according to Lacan, reach their destination. We all write with others, even or especially when we sit down to make work that is classified as a monograph, a site of supposedly individual effort. What a particular honor then, to have the letter that is my book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, […]
