The Visual History of Computational Health

FAIN: DOI-293791-23

Rice University (Houston, TX 77005-1827)
Kirsten Anne Ostherr (Project Director: February 2023 to present)

Research and development of a scholarly monograph on the history of the computational approaches to healthcare, 1960s-2000s. 

This project seeks to determine the implicit humanistic values embedded in the design and use of healthcare technologies. Through archival research and analysis of audiovisual media produced by medical professionals and technology developers, this project will explain how early ideas about emerging healthcare technologies transformed patient care by envisioning human bodies as quantitative data. This move not only excluded the messy, non-linear, emotional, and unpredictable aspects of embodied illness experiences, it also excluded the experiences of gendered, racialized, and minoritized patients. By examining how future uses of computers in healthcare were imagined from the 1960s onward, this project will show how the development of computational approaches to patient care worked precisely by erasing the human elements of illness and healing. A resulting book manuscript, The Visual History of Computational Health, will narrate the throughline from these early imaginings to the present.