Keeping the electronic care record locked: lessons from history

Professors Wallace, Delaney, and Sullivan provide us with an unsettling glimpse into the arcane world of industrial scale medical science.1 I am reminded of the European Enlightenment, the birth place of this very scientific approach to the mysteries of nature. Between 1750 and 1770 the French philosopher, Denis Diderot, devoted himself to the creation of the Encyclopédie, a monumental attempt to capture every branch of human knowledge. He believed that comprehensive knowledge would ‘give the power to change men’s common way of thinking’.2 The project was mired in controversy largely through fears from the church and the aristocracy of giving the power of knowledge to the common people; as it turned out the fears were justified. Will this latest incarnation of Diderot’s project liberate the people from our contemporary ‘aristocracy’, the elites of big business and politics? I fear not. Amid the ambition for comprehensive data and the explicit desire to boost the UK economy, the suffering individual is lost within the beguiling binary world of the 0 and the 1. This uniquely ill man, woman, or child is anonymised, electronically dismantled and reassembled in a form that suits BIG PHARMA. This is Diderot’s progressive project turned on its head. Lets have nothing to do with it until we have learned how to appreciate the value of our uniqueness and of our shared destiny.

• © British Journal of General Practice 2013