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The Visual History of Computational Health – 9th Annual Michael E. DeBakey Lecture in the History of Medicine

Air date: Thursday, September 11, 2025, 2:00:00 PM
Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
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Description: The recent flurry of activity around AI for healthcare is part of a longer history of efforts to see and understand health through a computational lens. This talk will draw on archival research in the NLM historical films and videos collection, focusing on educational, instructional, and publicity films as well as television programs produced between 1960-1990 on the use of computers in healthcare by doctors, nurses, and other caregivers. These historical audiovisuals show how ideas about computational health technologies transformed approaches to patient care by envisioning human bodies as quantitative data. This talk will argue that making patients computer-readable meant excluding the non-linear, emotional, and unpredictable aspects of embodied illness experiences, while also making gendered, racialized, and minoritized patients invisible. This archive of visual media demonstrates that the representation of emergent technologies plays a vital role in framing discourse, perceptions, and policies that influence the role and human impact of computation in healthcare.
Author: Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, MPH – Gladys Louise Fox Professor and Director of Medical Humanities Research Institute, Rice University and 2021 NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellow
Runtime: 1 hour