Digitizing Diagnosis: Medicine, Minds, and Machines in Twentieth-Century America

A fascinating history of the first attempts to computerize medical diagnosis.

Winner of the 2026 CBI Human-Computer Interaction History Prize from the Charles Babbage Institute

Beginning in the 1950s, interdisciplinary teams of physicians, engineers, mathematicians, and philosophers began to explore the possible application of a new digital technology to one of the most central, and vexed, tasks of medicine: diagnosis. In Digitizing Diagnosis, Andrew Lea examines these efforts—and the larger ...