Questions about medical records coming out of reading of Focuault

The Patient Question: [When does the subject who goes to the hospital to be cured change?  Who is going to hospitals?  When and why?  What kind of persons do we have on hospital beds?  When are they 'patients'?]

Subject of Medicine Question:  [When does the subject begin to be defined by these medical records?  When are persons, and not just patients, medicalized?  Relatedly, when do medical records become privileged?]

Medical Records Questions:  [When do medical records begin to be preserved within hospitals? Standardized to an extent so they can be distributed between different hospitals?  Summarizable so they can be extended to other domains/practices (i.e., medical records used in education, in criminal court, in insurance contracts, in epidemeology)?  These other domains/practices might be a possible entry in.]

Technical function of medical records technology:  [Who is compiling the medical records?  Nurses?  Medical secretaries?  What is their knowledge, role, and technological function?  Training manuals as a possible entry in.]

 Framing Question: What literature should our analysis be framed through?  Who is our audience?  What disciplines and/or journals do we want to speak to?


One possible hunch (but just a hunch at this point): [If the medicalization of the hospital was an effect/strategy (?) of 18^th c. disciplinary power, then the medicalization of the person-become-patient was an effect/strategy (?) of 20^th c. infopolitical documentation.]