The increased demand for distant cures amid heightened concerns about infection in healthcare facilities, coupled with the “great resignation” in medicine since the COVID pandemic, have together created the unfortunate circumstances in which we find the American healthcare system in 2024. This is a moment, like many we have seen before, in which new, unproven technologies are being promoted as cures for the social, political, and ideological problems facing medicine in the United States. In this context, two recent books – Jeremy Greene’s The Doctor Who Wasn’t There and Hannah Zeavin’s The Dis ..read more

The Distance Cure and The Doctor Who Wasn’t There are political books about medical media. Zeavin offers illuminating analyses of a range of distant psychotherapies: epistolary analysis, telephonic church services, suicide crisis telephone hotlines, computer-based therapies, and e-therapy (what Zeavin calls “therapeutic written speech”). For her, the media involved in these therapies are “active metaphors in their power to translate old psychical experiences onto new forms, into teletherapeutic encounters” (225), and as such can be invested with a good deal of political hope. We all have a “me ..read more

“all new media deal in futures” -Jeremy Greene “automation is the dream of autonomy” -Hannah Zeavin It was at once an odd experience and an exhilarating one. Sitting at the edge of the sofa, I leaned over towards the coffee table to turn on my laptop and open the required application. I waited, intermittently checking my phone for a text notification announcing that the link for my appointed time was sent.  An iPad was propped up on the table as well, picking up snippets of conversations between me and my partner; hopefully it would be effective in transcribing the audio through the lapto ..read more

Hanna Zeavin’s The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, and Jeremy A. Greene’s The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth, are both histories of technology and medicine that question the centrality of the expert as the deciding factor in the success or failure of medical technologies. In Zeavin’s book, the expertise of the psychologist is largely eroded by approachable, amateur forms of counseling and mental health intervention by telephone—such as volunteer-staffed mental health and suicide crisis lines, and even programmatic, computerized forms of “the ..read more

To read these two brilliant books side by side is an exhilarating experience—they not only offer new historical and theoretical insights into the role of media in clinical care, but they point towards unique (and uniquely thorny) historiographic questions. For as these media wended their way through medical and therapeutic treatments, they also left peculiar types of records for the archivist and historian, records that have and will shape the types of stories we tell about them. As Lisa Gitelman has put it, the writer is “always already being ‘done’ by the media she studies.”[1] I’d like to u ..read more

The origins of The Doctor Who Wasn’t There are inescapably tangled with The Distance Cure—tangled in cords of telephone wires. The telephone was both the subject and object and medium of our meeting. I had been noticing the iterative updates to the electronic health record in the community health center where I practiced, watching my clinical colleagues alternate between breathless anticipation or (more frequently) exhaustion in the face of the rapid shifts in the digital mediation of healthcare we were witnessing well before the COVID pandemic.  And I had a sliver of insight that the med ..read more

Letters always, according to Lacan, reach their destination. We all write with others, even or especially when we sit down to make work that is classified as a monograph, a site of supposedly individual effort.  What a particular honor then, to have the letter that is my book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, considered alongside the work of one of its intended addressees. Jeremy Greene’s The Doctor Who Wasn’t There, as it was being written, shaped my own work immensely; for a group of colleagues, whose own scholarship is signal, to read them in tandem is a great honor and dee ..read more

In this forum, five scholars from different but intersecting fields of historical research engage with Hannah Zeavin and Jeremy Greene’s recent books on telehealth and telemedicine. As all of the contributors highlight, Zeavin and Greene’s books provide inspiring analyses of the potentials and limitations of electronic technologies in medicine and healthcare. In the following, I will first provide a very brief and necessarily very selective summary of the two books and then sketch some of the major themes that run through this Book Forum’s discussion. Jeremy Greene’s The Doctor Who Wasn’t Ther ..read more

The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media, by Bishnupriya Ghosh (Duke University Press, 2023) In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and with various forecasts predicting likelihoods of a similar event in the near future, one cannot help but ask: in the Anthropocene, are we doomed to relentlessly prepare for and react to emerging viral threats? Not so, argues Bishnupriya Ghosh in her monograph, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media; other human–virus relations are possible. How, one might ask? Ghosh’s answer: Media. The book has been coming a long time. Ghosh began writing it in 2005 ..read more

Introduction At present, we are living through several major, arguably foreseen, historical events and political shifts. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilised and further fragmented Britain’s social, economic, and healthcare systems. Additionally, the cost-of-living crisis has resulted in the disturbing increase of the reliance on foodbanks for the employed and unemployed alike (BBC News. 2022a; 2022b) and has also contributed to a devastating increase in the number of people who live in poverty and suffer from poverty-related diseases (Marmot et al., 2020). In many ways, Britain ..read more