Imagining what the future will be like is a habit that people of any decade have. But few do it with as much passion as Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) did. The German author and inventor based in the United States wrote an article in 1925 that accurately predicted the times that were to come at that time.
Gernsback, a communicator and radio enthusiast, had been writing for the magazine “Electrical Experimenter” since 1913. From 1920 onwards, the publication was renamed “Science and Invention”. In 1925, he predicted that a state-of-the-art device would be available 50 years from now, which to this day has not yet been invented.
The so-called “teledactyl” would be the object that would allow doctors to conduct remote consultations with their patients through a screen. Not only to see and hear them, but also to touch them. Sounds a little familiar, right? What Gernsback anticipated was a more modern type of telemedicine, so common especially in times of Covid.
“The teledactyl (Tele, far; dactyl, finger – from the Greek) is a future instrument by which it will be possible for us to ‘feel at a distance’,” the German wrote almost 100 years ago. “This idea is not at all impossible, for the instrument can be built today with the means now available. It is simply the well-known teleautograph, translated into radio terms, with additional refinements. The doctor of the future, by means of this instrument, will be able to feel his patient, so to speak, at a distance,” he continued.
Inventor and author Hugo Gernsback.
According to him, the doctor would manipulate the controls wherever he was and mechanical hands would handle the patient in another environment. “The doctor sees what is happening in the patient's room through a television screen.”
At that time, radio, the advent of talking pictures and the beginning of what would become television showed a very real future in terms of bridging distances through screens or communication devices. This aspect of social transformation was noted by Gernsback.
“As we progress, we find that our duties multiply and we have less and less to carry our physical bodies to do business, to enjoy ourselves, and so on,” he said.
“The busy doctor fifty years from now will not be able to visit his patients as he does now. It takes too much time and he can at best only see a limited number of them today. Whereas the services of a really great doctor are so important that he should never have to leave his office; on the other hand, his patients cannot always come to him. This is where teledactyl and radio diagnostics come in,” he reflected.
Not bad, huh? Maybe, sooner than we think, Hugo Gernsback's vision will become reality.
Source: https://www.hypeness.com.br/2021/09/como-a-telemedicina-era-imaginada-em-1925/
