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Excerpt
This thumbnail sketch introduces the subject only in general terms. It accepts the working hypothesis that television (with other audiovisual aids) has a valuable contribution to make in the classroom, the clinic, and the laboratory; in teaching, research, and health education. Television can conquer space and time by many techniques. In the end, the practical application of television's ability to conquer space and time is limited only by the teacher's imagination, skill, and effort.
The pervasive current viewpoint that TV is either vaudeville or merely popular entertainment blurs the image of what TV may contribute to the students and faculty of a medical school. For the purposes of medical education it must be made clear that there are many kinds of television. Like the instrument in surgeon's kit, each kind of TV has its uses and its dangers, its pros and cons…
… The faculty members, as the source of the teaching programs, are the essential fabricators of any comprehensive plan for the use of TV in its five audience areas: medical students; practicing physicians; specialists; dentists, nurses and allied scientists; the public. TV can provide the faculty of a medical school with:
A mechanism of interdepartmental cooperation…
An experimental field for pedagogic techniques…
Aid in the solution of burdens of postgraduate instruction…
… The integration and correlation of courses within the school of medicine has become a kind of Holy Grail sought by most educators and found, if all, by a rare few. It is precisely in this area of correlation that TV probably can make its greatest contribution by permitting the teacher to lead the student freely through time and space, and interchangeably from clinical to basic sciences, and even into the social sciences.
TV helps both specialist and family physicians to save time by eliminating the space between them and the medical center.
The television system has an extraordinary range of capacities which lend themselves to the use of the astute investigator. The great light sensitivity of the tubes means that flurographic screens can be visualized in virtual darkness, that clinical material can be telecast without the inordinate and disturbing lighting required for motion pictures, that psychiatric patients can be studied and kinescoped without the necessity for obtrusive and expensive studio lighting. Experimentation will prove the special values of the medium.
… [T]here will be many diagnostic applications of television. Telegastroscopy is now under development. Television-estimated blood counts have already been demonstrated. Telefluoroscopy may well prove a standard method for gastro-intestinal and cardiovascular diagnosis.
… Part II of this report goes into detail on the uses of color TV and monochrome TV.*
… A recent Supreme Court decision has made possible the first step toward standardization of color TV. Such standardization will forc[e] today's high “custom built” equipment costs down to comparatively inexpensive levels.
Color TV is no longer a laboratory toy. It is here today, it give excellent pictures, and it can be used in a hundred-and-one ways other than the demonstration of surgical techniques with which it is commonly associated.
*For Part II see page 300.
