This paper historicises the criticisms and backlash from within medicine against new computer technologies in the clinic. Physicians’ reactions to proposals for the implementation of algorithmic technologies in the clinic ranged from enthusiastic to cautionary to critical from as early as the 1960s. Clinicians were suspicious of these technologies as they threatened their professional expertise. I argue that these discontent reactions from doctors demonstrate an implicit struggle for authority over clinical spaces and with regards to medicine's place within society more generally. Drawing on Foucault's concept of discursive rules and their function within a closed community, I recover the forgotten debate to include or reject AI and its predecessor technologies of expert systems and neural networks. This paper explains how and why justifications for and against the applicability of AI to the clinic are underpinned by questions of medical authority. I conclude with an inquiry into the transformative possibilities of partisanship.
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