Science & Tech Quote by Samuel Wilson

There is a quiet audacity in attributing medicine's biggest challenge to “the incorporation of information technology,” especially from a public servant born in 1766, when “information technology” meant ledgers, dispatches, and the slow bureaucracy of paper. Read in context, the line isn’t really about gadgets. It’s about governance: the friction that happens when an institution built on craft, hierarchy, and local autonomy is asked to submit to systems that standardize knowledge and make it portable.

The phrasing “in our practices” does a lot of work. It acknowledges medicine as culture as much as science: habits, rituals, gatekeeping, professional identity. “Incorporation” is a merger word, not an inspiration word. It implies reluctance, compliance, and the messy reality of changing workflows - who records what, who gets access, who is accountable when the record contradicts the clinician’s memory.

As a public servant’s framing, the subtext tilts toward infrastructure and legitimacy. Better information systems promise coordination (tracking outbreaks, outcomes, supplies), but they also threaten discretion. Data turns judgment into something that can be audited, compared, even litigated. That’s why it lands as a “challenge,” not a “breakthrough”: technology doesn’t just add tools; it rearranges power, redistributes authority from bedside wisdom to institutional record.

If the quote feels anachronistic, that tension is instructive. Whether the “technology” is a filing system, a telegraph, or an electronic health record, the core problem stays stubbornly modern: medicine resists anything that makes its private art legible to the public machine.