 Show Medical records have a surprisingly long and illustrious history, stretching back to ancient civilisations like those in Egypt, Greece and Rome. Just as today medical records are our only evidence that a medical procedure or attempted cure has taken place, ancient stone tablets (which are unlikely to be heading for the electronic in tray of a health insurer) are our first evidence of the discipline of medicine. Ancient scribes or transcriptionists probably never thought they were recording history but then who does when they are trying to decipher what the doctor writes or says! So read on to discover the fascinating history behind some of the earliest medical accounts recorded… with probably the odd typo! Medical Records in MesopotamiaAncient Mesopotamia was made up of various modern countries, including Iraq and parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey. It was in this region that rich civilisations flourished, including the Sumerians and the Babylonians, who ruled mighty empires more than 5000 years ago. Even at such a distant time in history, these civilisations understood the importance of medical records, however they were wise enough not to try to match their procedures to Medicare provider numbers, or even the ICD-5000BC codes! Archaeologists have dug up thousands of records in the form of clay tablets (baked in fire) written in cuneiform (one of the oldest writing styles, and you might be forgiven for thinking that some modern doctors still write in cuneiform!). It’s clear from these records that their purpose was to document the patient’s history, just like today. Unlike modern day records, many of these Mesopotamian records also included information about spells, astrology and astronomy. Most of the remaining records are housed in the British Museum. So patient privacy may have been thought of differently back then. Egyptian Medical RecordsThe ancient Egyptians were meticulous recorders of their history and they had thousands of scribes to record it. Scribes were considered to be highly educated. Egyptian scribes were the forerunner to our modern day transcriptionists. Medical information was transcribed on scrolls of papyrus, a material that was made from a water plant. Egyptian records reveal that medicine was being practised in its many forms, from surgery to general medicine and even dentistry, more than 4000 years ago. And whilst x-ray reports are likely to be missing from these records, the odd diagram might have been used. Like in Mesopotamia, much of their medicine was still linked to magic, astrology and astronomy. The hot Egyptian climate has been excellent in preserving these medical records. It’s almost like an ancient form of hard drive or cloud storage. But unlike our medical records, the Egyptians had to make many duplicate copies by hand – can you imagine – no keyboard, no typewriter and a dictaphone would have been out of the question. Ancient Greek and Roman Medical RecordsGreek and Roman medical records tend to overlap, with both civilisations creating a systematic recording system more than 2000 years ago. The battle between Apple and IBM definitely has some roots in industry. Greek and Roman records had a much more contemporary focus, reducing the emphasis on magic and astrology. There is more of a logical and scientific train of thought with descriptions of a patient’s mental and physical history. However, the gods are still mentioned, and we’re not talking about surgeons! Locals felt that the gods were able to cause disease and that illness was viewed as a result of the gods’ displeasure. Greek and Roman medical records were transcribed on parchment, which is prone to disintegrating, a problem our modern electronic counterparts don’t have. Medical Records in the Digital AgeWe have come a long way since the days of ancient civilisations, and with ongoing digital and technological advancements, new methods are being developed all the time. At Synapse Medical, our speciality is paperwork, letting you focus on your patients. We offer services including medical billing and transcription, remote clinic coding, as well as app-only solutions. If you’d like to learn how Synapse Medical could help you be more efficient with your medical practice, call us on 1300 510 114 or contact us online. Other articles you may be interested in:
Feature photo by Michael Krnac on Unsplash
A team of archaeologists at the University of Birmingham may have found the earliest evidence of human time keeping activity. In a paper published earlier this week, the researchers announce that they have discovered a 10,000-year-old lunar calendar, etched in the earth near Aberdeen, on Scotland’s North Sea Coast. When this ancient stone-age site was first discovered by an aerial archaeological expedition in 02004, scientists were baffled by a series of 12 pits, dug into the terrain along a neat 50-meter arc. But new analysis has now revealed that these holes in fact comprise a system that tracks and mimics the regular cycle of lunar phases.
More impressive yet, these mesolithic timekeepers may even have been aware of a common logistical snag associated with lunar calendars: the fact that the monthly cycle of moon phases does not neatly align with the length of a solar year. The Birmingham archaeologists have found evidence to suggest that this landscape calendar included a way to mark the mid-winter solstice, allowing this community to re-calibrate their calendar with the annual progression of seasons. This calendar is nearly 5,000 years older than the oldest time-keeping structures found in Mesopotamia, and pre-dates the first-known emergence of sedentary societies in Europe. But this evidence of time tracking suggests that these Scottish hunter-gatherers may in fact have formed a more stable and organized community than previously thought. As Vincent Gaffney, lead researcher on the project, explains,
In other words, not only is the history of long-term thinking nearly 5,000 years longer than we had thought; one might even argue that long-term thinking is the very foundation of human civilization.
Do you have a question about history? Send us your question at history@time .com and you might find your answer in a future edition of Now You Know. The question of which sound was the first ever to be recorded seems to have a pretty straightforward answer. It was captured in Paris by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the late 1850s, nearly two decades before Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call (1876) or Thomas Edison’s phonograph (1877). But it turns out that, while the answer is clear, the question is complicated. Crucially, while Scott recorded the sound, he didn’t think people would ever hear the recordings he made. Instead, he thought they would read the tracings. So the first sound to be recorded was not the same as the first recorded sound to be played back. That second milestone wouldn’t come until Edison’s time. “The idea of somehow putting those signals back into the air never occurred to [Scott], nor did it occur to any human being on the planet until 1877,” says David Giovannoni, an audio historian. That doesn’t mean you can’t hear those sounds today: in 2008, the First Sounds collaboration, which Giovannoni cofounded, managed to make Scott’s work audible. It’s also worth noting that Scott’s recording was man-made and captured sound out of the air, changing over a period of time; sound records of other kinds predate his experiments. Patrick Feaster, a sound-media historian and First Sound co-founder, underlines the fact that the lack of playback doesn’t mean Scott doesn’t deserve the credit. “This was a full fledged record of sound, no question about that, just as a seismograph records earthquakes,” Feaster says. “No one faults seismographs for not playing back earthquakes.” What Was RecordedSo what did Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville record? That answer comes down to which Scott’s recordings was successful enough to count. He wasn’t a professional scientist or inventor, but had aspirations to break into that world. By 1853 or 1854 he had an idea: Using the daguerreotype as his model, he thought that if a camera replicates an eye to fix image to paper, some sort of mechanical ear could fix sound to paper. Scott called his invention the phonautograph. A vibrating membrane, working as the eardrum, was attached to a thin stylus that would trace the way the membrane moved. By covering a sheet of paper or a glass plate in a fine layer of soot and moving it under the stylus, Scott could capture the fine, wavy trail it left. A trained reader could interpret those lines — essentially the image of the sound wave — to know what the sound was. Or at least that was the plan. It turned out to be much harder than Scott anticipated for people to read words from images of sound waves; even today, though aspects of sound such as pitch or amplitude are somewhat visually interpretable in audio-editing software, that’s not really something people can do. His early efforts are documented, but the recordings are extremely short and, Feaster says, “these were so crudely done that it’s not really clear these really count as sound recordings.” (Giovannoni once described them as a “squawk.”) In January of 1857 Scott deposited a manuscript detailing his work and some of his early recordings with the French Académie des Sciences and described what he hoped the phonautograph would one day achieve. It could record singers or actors, or be an “automatic stenographer” to transcribe conversations. “Will the improvisation of the writer, when it emerges in the middle of the night, be able to be recovered the next day with its freedom, this complete independence from the pen, an instrument so slow to represent a thought always cooled in its struggle with written expression?” he asked. Scott believed it would happen. That same year he applied for a patent. As he improved the recording apparatus, he switched from recording on a straight sheet of paper or glass to one wrapped around a cylinder, allowing longer recordings, but he was still moving the apparatus by hand, resulting in irregular timing. In 1859 and 1860 he recorded a tuning fork at the same time as the other vocalizations and sounds. The predictable vibration rate of a turning fork meant that Giovannoni, Feaster and others with the First Sounds collaboration could properly calibrate the time, making the recordings recognizable again. On April 9, 1860, Scott recorded a snippet of the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.” The specific “first recorded sound” would thus fall sometime between the early experiments and the recognizable “Au Clair de la Lune” record. (You can listen to 1857, 1859 and 1860 recordings on the First Sounds website.) But, because the speed irregularities are so intense, it’s hard for modern researchers to know for sure whether the early recordings were successful or which one should count as first. And it was even harder to tell at the time, given that playback equipment hadn’t been invented yet. That situation put Scott in the odd position of being essentially unable to prove that his invention worked. Eventually, he gave up on the project — returning to it, with no small sense of indignation, only near the end of his life when Edison was making headlines. “In [one] sense he failed,” Giovannoni says, speaking of Scott’s hopes that the sound waves could be read visually. “In another sense, he succeeded wildly. The phonautograph was really the first machine to record sensory data in real time over time.” Some scientists did see the potential in the phonautography; Rudolph Koenig, a manufacturer of instruments for the study of acoustics, sold a version through 1901, and Alexander Graham Bell used a variation of the phonautograph to make some recordings of vowel sounds in 1874.
What Was HeardIn 1877, nearly 20 years later, Thomas Edison’s “talking machine” became the first that could both record and playback sound successfully. Edison had created a telegraphic repeater, which could automatically repeat a Morse code message and even speed it up beyond human capabilities, and in the summer of 1877 he was thinking about recording messages for telephones too. On July 17 of that year, he wrote in his notebook about reproducing a telephone message slow or fast. Edward Johnson, on a lecture circuit demonstrating Edison inventions, told his audience about the recording device Edison had begun to work on, and wrote to Edison about it. A week later Edison had sketched out some more ideas and labeled it a phonograph in his notebook. In the months before the world learned about the phonograph — it was in November that he allowed Johnson to write to Scientific American about the device — he considered various ways of recording, switched which material would be used to capture the recording (from paper tape covered with a “soft substance” to a thin tin foil), and finally had machinist John Kreusi make his designs into a real, functioning object. On December 7, the day after Kreusi finished making a fully fledged phonograph, Edison went to Scientific American‘s New York office with two colleagues to show off the phonograph. The magazine wrote about the visit and then explained how it worked: Edison “placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night. These remarks were not only perfectly audible to ourselves, but to a dozen or more persons gathered around, and they were produced by the aid of no other mechanism than the simple little contrivance.” This was the invention that got him the moniker “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” Though he would put the work aside for close to a decade before it was commercially viable — and in the meantime others, including Alexander Graham Bell, would make great strides in sound reproduction — Edison would be forever linked to the history of sound recording. But, while there’s good documentation of that work, such is not the case for the question of which sounds they recorded while they worked on the new creation. Edison’s earliest experimental recordings, “don’t survive as playable recordings, we only know about them from notes he made in his experimental notebooks,” says Feaster, and Kreusi probably made some of them too. Early notes suggest phrases such as greetings, the alphabet and “Did you get that?” were recorded first — though Edison claimed the first thing was a rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” In any case, that song is part of what is likely the oldest sound that was recorded and intended to be play back and that still exists and can be heard. Made on June 22, 1878, at one of the public demonstrations of Edison’s work, it captured the sound of a cornet, nursery rhymes including “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and laughter. Edison visited Washington, D.C., in April 1878 to exhibit his phonograph and talk to Congress and the President, and it was while there he visited the Smithsonian, where he learned about Scott’s phonautograph. Reportedly, he was impressed — but surprised that someone would invent this machine but not think of playing back the recording out loud. |
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