Our very own Dr. Jeremy Greene will be giving two Harvard University Mind, Brain, & Behavior (MBB) Distinguished Lectures this week, which you can attend virtually! Check them out:
Machines, Minds, and Medicine
As a historian of science, medicine, and technology and a practicing physician, my current research centers on communications technologies and the nature of medical thought (for both patients and practitioners). These talks are drawn from my current book project, The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). The first talk focuses on patients, and explores how the development of wearable wireless and DIY technologies for transmitting (and stimulating) brain functions reshaped patient experience and patient agency in the 20th century, especially around the contested definition of psychosis and the interface between neurology and psychiatry. The second talk focuses on physicians, and touches upon the role of algorithmic thinking in medical decision-making in postwar years, as early attempts at AI first modeled their decision processes after expert physicians (an origin of the “expert-systems” model of AI) and then became models for physicians to learn to think with as well.
Electronic Patients: The Wireless Brain
Date: Tuesday, April 26, 2022, 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Electronic Providers: The Push-Button Physician
Date: Wednesday, April 27, 2022, 4:00pm to 5:30pm