Paper short abstract:

This paper describes an experimental media laboratory established in 1967 by the Massachusetts General Hospital to “extend competent medical services to areas that are either too primitive or too sparsely settled to support a full-time doctor”.

Paper long abstract:

In March of 1969, a young physician took the podium at the Dupont Plaza Hotel to address the past and future of "The Amplified Doctor." Kenneth Bird was director of the Telemedicine Station, an experimental media laboratory established two years earlier by the Massachusetts General Hospital to "extend competent medical services to areas that are either too primitive or too sparsely settled to support a full-time doctor." Working with an array of direct two-way audio, visual, and sensory telecommunication devices, Bird attracted federal grant funding and corporate support in 1960s and 1970s to model the practice of medicine at a distance through networked communication technologies.

A half-century later, Bird is now celebrated as a prophetic founder of telemedicine and e-health in North America, and his name adorns the keynote lecture of the American Telemedical Association meetings. At the time, however, he saw himself as a tinkerer and apostle of media theory for the medical masses, channeling Marshall McCluhan in most of his public speeches. Seizing on McCluhan's metaphor of television as "the most recent and spectacular electric extension of our central nervous system," Bird developed a theory of how networked television would transform health in the era of the "wired city."

Making use of the rich archives of the MGH Telediagnostic Clinic, this paper will explore Bird's visions of transforming heath and medicine through analog media technologies, and assess their relevance to understanding the current hopes and hypes surrounding the technological mediation of health in our digital present