Guest post by Olivia Banner
I’ve just posted A History of Medical Records on Connexions (a Rice University-based repository for online learning modules). By showing medical record systems from the nineteenth century through the present, this project illustrates how the physician/patient encounter has been recorded, and the accompanying text begins to tease out what we can learn from the forms such records have taken.
When we teach about the history of medicine, students often take it for granted that medical records sit outside of history: that it is obvious what a hospital or a doctor would want to measure and record about their patients. Yet that information has changed over time, and what a hospital or a doctor selects as significant enough to record tells us much about the needs of medical institutions as well as what goes on within the physician-patient encounter. In addition, the format for those records has undergone constant transformations due to the introduction of new technologies, or changes in institutional needs, etc., and their format reveals much about medical practice.
The project is still in progress, and the materials I have been able to gather have been limited by what archives have saved (and medical records, seen as the stuff of bureaucracy, are often not considered important for the historical record) as well as by concerns about privacy. Materials from Los Angeles and Boston archives will be added in future months. Nevertheless, what is included here will help us all learn more about the history of medicine as it moved from the analog to the digital age.