“We shall never be able to practise medicine in the future, without exploiting some kinds of magnetic storage device,” said Dr Paul Hall, of the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, in a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of May 28 1969.
“Every 24 hours a new drug is found and there is now a total of about 35,000 diagnoses listed and that is more than any man can be right about all the time”, said Dr Hall.
Sweden had started looking seriously at using computers in its health service after rapidly rising costs meant that, between 1966 and 1969, the cost of the Swedish health service doubled.
‘If this trend continues the entire total of Swedish taxation will be devoted to the health service in the year 2007’, reads the EW story.
Well, 2007 has come and gone without that happening.
Thanks to those ‘magnetic storage devices’.
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