While most of the advances in telehealth have taken place in the last 20 to 30 years, Craig and Patterson (2005) describe much earlier uses such as the use of bonfires to alert neighboring villages of the arrival of bubonic plague during the middle ages.
The National Institutes of Mental Health supported a program in the mid-1950’s that connected seven state hospitals in four different states via a closed-circuit telephone system (Venable 2005).