The Lancet on the telephone 1876-1975.

IT HAS BEEN a hundred years since Alexander Graham Bell succeeded in transmitting speech electrically. As is well known, the first words spoken by Bell on the telephone on 10 March 1876 were: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." What is not generally remembered is that the very first telephone call was also the first telephone call for medical assistance for Bell had just upset the wet battery powering the transmitter thus spilling sulphuric acid on his clothes. Thomas A. Watson, Bell's assistant, appeared quickly from across the hall where he had been listening to the receiver and proceeded simultaneously to celebrate the first time anyone had ever talked over wire and to administer first aid.' That first call turned out to be prophetic for one of the first applications of telephony was in the practice of medicine and health care in a variety of ways that could hardly have been anticipated even by the imaginative Graham Bell. The full impact of the telephone has yet to be appreciated largely because it has been neglected as a subject of serious study. But the telephone did not go unnoticed by medical practitioners or their patients. Indeed, there is evidence to show that doctors were the first professionals to be required to have a telephone and to be on call, so to speak, around the clock. The role of the telephone in the field of health was also frequently commented upon in medical journals, and although such articles, occasional despatches from correspondents and letters to the editor do not by themselves constitute complete evidence of its influence, they do render an account of the uses (and abuses) to which it was put as well as the kinds of issues that were raised by its availability. This paper will review the writings about the telephone in the Lancet, a medical journal that predated the introduction of Bell's remarkable device and which is still being published. The Lancet's coverage of the telephone from 1876 to the present constitutes a history of the role that instrument played in the field of health care, an especially informative one given that journal's importance in recording the major events in the development of medicine. There were many references to the telephone in the Lancet although not all of these discussed the influence of the new mode of communication on health. Many items dealt with general topics about the telephone of the kind that appeared in newspapers and journals that did not specialize in medicine. Thus the Lancet carried many entries dealing with the high cost of subscribing to the telephone, the poor quality of the service, the absence of privacy occasioned *S. A. Aronson M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University ofNew York. The author is grateful to Nancy Aronson for her research assistance. 1 Catherine Mackenzie, Alexander Graham Bell, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1928, pp. 114115.