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May 2023 Vol. 60 No. 9

This volume offers a decades-long professional investigation of telemedicine, lately a victim of opportunistic post-COVID-19 lockdown days. Greene (Johns Hopkins Univ.) provides an enlightening, vivacious text written in an authoritative, fact-driven tone. The first chapter crushes the myth of electronic telemedicine as a 21st-century phenomenon, tracing its origins to the expansion of the telephone in the 1880s. Greene's overview of the procession of hype, gadgets, and prognostications about the death of the doctor-patient relationship that accompanied the introduction of Bell's invention establishes the historical pattern still followed by consumer (and sometimes military) remote technologies when retooled for medicine. From there, supported by coeval photographs that help rekindle the historical atmosphere, Greene guides readers through the birth of non-invasive—thus telemedical—diagnostic tools, the ever-present beeper, and closed-circuit television. The book next offers a definitive portrait of the endeavors of computer-based information and automation technologies in contemporary medicine, perhaps more familiar to today's readers. Greene concludes with insightful final reflections. Maybe groundbreaking innovations are always misunderstood in their own times, but the doomsday prophets' dystopian predictions dissipate as promises materialize and become familiar. The past in telemedicine naturally becomes the grotesque image of the present: this is the main lesson of Greene's text.

--P. Rodriguez del Pozo, Weill Cornell Medical College

Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.