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Hugo Gernsback's 1954 solution to the doctor
shortage was the ultimate in bringing the patient to the overworked
physician: an updated version of the 1924
Radio Doctor called the "Teledoctor." Personally, I would
have held out for "robodoc," but that's another story.
Delivered to your front door on a rental plan, this
melding of television and diagnostics was supposed to be capable of
measuring blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and even had a built-in
stethoscope. Whether or not the latter had a cooling mechanism
to cause the patient to jump the requisite height is undetermined.
But it wasn't just a remote monitoring device with
a two-way television attached, it also incorporated the latest in
remote-controlled robot hands (or claws in this case) that allowed the
attending physician to administer tests, write prescriptions, give
injections, bandage wounds, and even perform minor surgery from the
comfort of the golf club bar-- I mean his office.
Remarkably, all this television interchange,
data traffic and robot-manipulation signal was transmitted through an
ordinary phone jack. Apparently bandwidth wasn't a factor that
Gernsback considered very important. Neither was the tricky
problem of how to squeeze all those robotics into a compact, portable
device. It's interesting how the television apparatus pictured
here looks the right size for 1954, but the mechanical arms and such
take up surprisingly little room even by today's standards.
Notice also that the mechanical arms on the
patient's end have elbows, but the doctor's control rods don't, which
would have made it a bit like performing surgery in a pair of arm
casts. |
