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Machines that can learn and correct themselves already perform better than doctors at some tasks, says Jörg Goldhahn, but Vanessa Rampton and Giatgen A Spinas maintain that machines will never be able to replicate the inter-relational quality of the therapeutic nature of the doctor-patient relationship

Machines that can learn and correct themselves already perform better than doctors at some tasks, says Jörg Goldhahn, but Vanessa Rampton and Giatgen A Spinas maintain that machines will never be able to replicate the inter-relational quality of the therapeutic nature of the doctor-patient relationship Jörg Goldhahn deputy head 1 , Vanessa Rampton Branco Weiss fellow 2 , Giatgen A Spinas emeritus professor 3

Evolving technologies may yet provide the medicine that patients expect

This article explores the relationship between medicine’s history and its digital present through the lens of the physician-patient relationship. Today the rhetoric surrounding the introduction of new technologies into medicine tends to emphasize that technologies are disturbing relationships, and that the doctor-patient bond reflects a more ‘human’ era of medicine that should be preserved. Using historical studies of pre-modern and modern Western European medicine, this article shows that patient-physician relationships have always been shaped by material cultures. We discuss three activities – recording, examining, and treating – in the light of their historical antecedents, and suggest that the notion of ‘human medicine’ is ever-changing: it consists of social attributions of skills to physicians that played out very differently over the course of history.