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

Chapter 6Radiology Rounds

Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there… . The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety.”

—Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

When I was a medical student in the 1980s, the beating heart of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was not the hospital’s mahogany-lined executive suite, nor the dazzling operating room of L. Henry Edmunds, Jr., HUP’s most famed cardiac surgeon. No, it was in the decidedly unglamorous, dimly lit Chest Reading Room, where all the x-rays were hung on a moving contraption called an alternator that resembled the one on which the clothes hang at your ...