Fall 2024 Colloquium - Andrew Lea

Title: Doctor’s Order: Managing Medical Information in the Twentieth Century

Abstract: Doctors have struggled with the problem of information overload for centuries. Their lamentations grew particularly loud over the course of the twentieth century, as therapeutic preparations and medical publications began to proliferate like never before. A core strategy for grappling with the information-saturated environment involved the creation of personal filing systems: physicians developed and shared elaborate systems that included journal reprints, interesting patient cases, clinical notes, and other sources that could span dozens of filing cabinets. In this talk, I explore the material culture and moral economy that supported these filing systems in twentieth-century medicine. I ultimately demonstrate how physicians, in implementing filing systems, curated different discovery environments that influenced their thinking, identity, and practice. A historical perspective illuminates the enduring yet evolving ways in which seemingly banal reference systems—from textbooks to AI—have profound impacts on medical care.