This article explores the relationship between medicine’s history and its digital present through the lens of the physician-patient relationship. Today the rhetoric surrounding the introduction of new technologies into medicine tends to emphasize that technologies are disturbing relationships, and that the doctor-patient bond reflects a more ‘human’ era of medicine that should be preserved. Using historical studies of pre-modern and modern Western European medicine, this article shows that patient-physician relationships have always been shaped by material cultures. We discuss three activities – recording, examining, and treating – in the light of their historical antecedents, and suggest that the notion of ‘human medicine’ is ever-changing: it consists of social attributions of skills to physicians that played out very differently over the course of history.

本文通过医患关系的视角探讨了医学的历史与其数字化呈现之间的关系。如今，围绕将新技术引入医学的言论往往强调技术正在扰乱关系，而医患关系反映了一个应该保留的更加“人性化”的医学时代。本文通过对前现代和现代西欧医学的历史研究表明，医患关系始终是由物质文化塑造的。我们根据历史背景讨论了记录、检查和治疗这三项活动，并提出“人类医学”的概念是不断变化的：它由医生技能的社会属性组成，这些属性在不同时期表现得截然不同。历史的进程。