Medicine on the net from isolation to universal connectivity

Medical skill has always been scarce. Originally, it was available only to those who could arrange to be with a practitioner. But technology has, over the past 170 years, provided successively better ways of providing medical service despite separation in time and space. The Internet, personal computers, wireless devices, high-resolution graphic displays, and similar technologies are just the current step in a process of distributed medicine that started with the telegraph.