2014 in History: Action at a Distance

Jeremy Greene, Johns Hopkins University and Mark Hagerott, United States Naval Academy

Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science

Thursday, December 11, 2014 6:00 pm EST

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

Location:
Historical Society of Pennsylvania
1300 Locust Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Time:
Thursday, December 11, 6:00 - 7:30 pm

The current debate about robotic and drone warfare is largely conducted without a historical context that can illuminate the possible strategic and social implications of these military technological innovations. Mark R. Hagerott will offer a historical framework to view these accelerating developments. He is Deputy Director and Distinguished Professor of Cyber Security at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD. He is a Rhodes scholar, a retired Captain of the U.S. Navy, a former Security Advisor to the Afghan Army, and author of publications in the Journal of Military History, Foreign Policy Magazine, and SLATE.com. He has made presentations at the United Nations, Geneva; Defense One Summit, Washington, D.C.; the Pentagon, Washington, D.C.; and the Smithsonian Institution. To advocates of telemedicine, health disparities can be solved with communications technologies. Local differences in health, resources, access and information may be eliminated by sensors, mobile phone applications, and human-technology interfaces. But these technologies also threaten to disrupt doctor-patient relations and the ethics of clinical practice. Similar hopes and fears accompanied the introduction of telephones and other communication technologies in medicine in the past. Jeremy A. Greene will provide a history of telemedicine to help us understand this intersection of technology and medicine. He is Associate Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, as well as Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) and Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). He is also a practicing doctor of internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University.