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"The permanent government now is the anchorpeople. They don't get elected, and year after year they're responding emotionally to this or that."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Telemedicine Apparatus | ||
| First reference to a device that allows physicians to examine or aid patients at a distance. |
Vashti lives in an age in which people live alone in a single room - the Machine serves all their needs. Direct experience is a thing of the past - when she faces it, she panics.
| Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.
"Kuno," she said, "I cannot come to see you. I am not well." Immediately an enormous apparatus fell on to her out of the ceiling, a thermometer was automatically laid upon her heart. She lay powerless. Cool pads soothed her forehead. Kuno had telegraphed to her doctor. So the human passions still blundered up and down in the Machine. Vashti drank the medicine that the doctor projected into her mouth, and the machinery retired into the ceiling. |
| From The Machine Stops,
by E.M. Forster. Published by Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909 Additional resources -
|
This is a very early use of the idea of using some sort of machine to allow physicians to examine patients at a distance. The earliest efforts in telemedicine date from around 1905; telecardiology via telephone was demostrated by Willem Einthoven. Telestethoscopy using the telephone was tried in the 1920's.
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As far as the future is concerned 'they're the only experts we have'.
'The walls and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum tiles...'
'The planes flew continuously, twenty-four hours a day...'
'It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.'
'...a single perfectly level platform, which rose so high above the water that it was not splashed by the waves.'
'Is an extra-factual memory that convincing?' Quail asked.
