The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age

Chapter 4The Note

To advance professional improvement, a friendly and unreserved intercourse should subsist between the gentlemen of the faculty, with a free communication of whatever is extraordinary or interesting in the course of their hospital practice. And an account of every case or operation, which is rare, curious, or instructive, should be drawn up by the physician or surgeon.

—Thomas Percival, nineteenth-century English physician and the father of modern medical ethics, 1803

If our computers could speak (yes, I know they can, sort of), they might be putting up a fuss about the previous chapter, particularly its implication that, by consuming every bit of the physician’s attention, they bear sole responsibility for upending the doctor-patient ...