Yvan Craig - Experiments in Care: Technology, Innovation, and the Promise and Peril of Intensive Care Medicine

In the early 1950s, the city of Copenhagen was overwhelmed by an outbreak of polio. The heroic effort by the city’s physicians and nurses to keep patients breathing as they recovered from their infections would eventually give birth to the modern intensive care unit, and the new specialty of intensive care medicine. By the 1960s, the technologies that shaped intensive care medicine had changed the direction of major Danish manufactures like Radiometer, and those manufacturers in turn had shaped much of the practice of intensive care medicine. This technological transformation had profound but often hidden consequence for hospital medicine that continued into the 21st century, and had important ramifications during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic.


This lecture will trace the history of the modern intensive care unit and its origins in the 1950s, and examine the complex role that new technological innovations played in shaping both the possibilities of intensive care, and its many sources of iatrogenic risk.



The lecture is open for all and takes place at the DIAS Auditorium