This week, on For the Medical Record, Richard and Mia chat with Benjamin Breen, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Santa Cruz. Breen talks about the paper he presented as part of the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology's colloquium series, "The James Siblings in the Age of Quantification." They discuss the James family and their philosophies about the relationship between modern technology and the body as well as how Breen might be looking at this project as a pre-history of artificial intelligence. Enjoy!

For more of Breen's work, check out his books, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central Publishing, 2024).

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For the Medical Record is a podcast from Johns Hopkins University's Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, hosted by Research Associate Richard Del Rio and Postdoctoral Fellow Mia Levenson. New episodes are released biweekly.

In these episodes, we talk to people affiliated with the Center to discuss their research within the history of medicine and the medical humanities. We ask them why their work matters, and how history and the humanities can help us to better understand debates and practices within medicine and care today.