Paper short abstract:

In the late 1940s and 1950s, medical schools began to experiment with the teaching of medicine "by other means," leveraging the new medium of television. This paper mobilizes the concept of "platform standards" to attend to the forces at play in the early history of medical television.

Paper long abstract:

In the late 1940s and 1950s, medical schools began to experiment with the teaching of medicine "by other means," leveraging the then-emergent platform of television in graduate, post-graduate, and continuing medical education. Like all new technologies, television's insertion into an established context of practice disrupted medical education's standard operating procedures. New actors — the television camera, the television technician -- in the teaching hospital reconfigured and displaced hierarchies of expertise in medical apprenticeship. This paper traces the contestations that mark the early history of medical television: struggles over the meaning of a new media platform, strategies to contain television's (re)distribution of medical knowledge, as well as skirmishes over authority that accompanied efforts by previously marginalized medical technicians to professionalize and assert their legitimacy. In particular, this paper mobilizes the concept of "platform standards" to attend to the historical forces at play: pedagogical standards, aesthetic standards, hardware standards, and the sometimes conflicting values of interoperability, accessibility, and quality.