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The body and the digital archive: the Visible Human Project and the computerization of medicine

1997; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/136345939700100206

1461-7196

Catherine Waldby,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

This paper addresses itself to some biopolitical issues raised by the computerization of medicine. It is now widely accepted in cultural studies and the sociology of medicine that the computer offers a conceptual model to medicine for the organization of human bodies, and that bodies are increasingly understood as forms of digital archive. However this paper uses one recent development in medical computer imaging, the Visible Human Project, to argue that the computerization of medicine also involves a material reorganization of at least some bodies, a reorganization which reveals a biopolitical hierarchy of more and less valuable bodies within the framework of high-technology medicine.