An Experiment in Performative History:

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe parts of the history and development in Denmark of the interdisciplinary field of study known as medical informatics, which has been crucially involved in the current high-profile development of a national Danish electronic care record. This turn of events has enabled an increasing naturalization of the history of the discipline, but in this paper I suggest that this understanding is highly selective and limiting for coming to terms with the heterogeneity and contingency of events, which lead to the current situation. Both science and technology studies (STS) and deconstruction have tried to take such a contingency into account in their historiographic efforts. My experiment is to ‘diffract’ STS (as instanced here by cyborg history) and deconstruction through each other, in order to try to answer the following question: how does one tell the history of medical informatics in a subtle way, which does not lean upon a teleological belief in the development of better technologies and the concurrent need of medical informatics to put such developments to their proper use? The challenge is to tell it instead as formed by a multiplicity of actors, none of whom have been fully in control of themselves or other participants. In other words, it is to write an experimental history of medical informatics, which is not burdened with the idea that the electronic care record necessarily will be the crown jewel of the discipline and that this future was inherent in the discipline’s development from the outset.