What a Doctor Learns From Watching You on Video Chat

In the 1880s, a few short years after the telephone’s invention, futurists envisioned a modern doctor unrestricted by time and space. “That specialist would sit in a web of wires,” the Johns Hopkins medical historian Jeremy Greene told me, “and take the pulse of the nation.” At the time, and for decades after, medical practice remained circumscribed by geography. Black bag in tow, packed with every tool a physician would need, roaming doctors traveled by automobile or horseback and tended to the bedridden wherever they lay. But by the mid-20th century, clinicians stopped trekking from household to household.

“The old-school home visit is just totally impractical,” Charles Owens, the director of Georgia Southern University’s Center for Public Health Practice and Research, told me. “It’s logistically kind of a train wreck.”