ABSTRACT
The Visible Human Project constitutes a decisive move within medical knowledge away from the bibliometrics of the anatomical text and toward the cybermetrics of the anatomical simulation. The performative flexibility of the figures, described to some extent in the previous chapter and discussed in greater detail here, is an aesthetic yield produced by the performative flexibility of visual data itself. This economy of simulation produces, in turn, multiple use values in the field of diagnostic and surgical imaging. The two data-figures are currently being adapted and utilised in a rapidly expanding range of clinical and pedagogical applications, circulating as new, universal anatomical norms throughout the ever expanding networks of cybermedicine. This move is not merely a matter of better or different modes of representation. Rather, it has important implications for ways in which medicine can work the relationship between the body’s endosoma and exosoma, surface and depth. In the previous chapter I argued that the anatomical text is a technology which writes the body as a technological ensemble in workable space, an assemblage of organ-tools whose order can be both analysed and adapted to prosthetic reordering. The anatomy text opens the body out as a system of instruments, with potential relationships to other forms of instrumentation. The transformations of anatomical practice involved in the Visible Human Project generate new forms of access and prosthesis, new ways to plot trajectories through the complex partitionings and flows that constitute the bodily interior. It alters the ways in which biomedicine can address the body and engage in therapeutic and normative interventions in the macroanatomical morphology. It refines and potentiates ways that the space of living bodies can be worked in relation to the space of visual computation. This chapter examines this process of transformation, with a particular focus on the relationship between tomographic imaging and surgical practice.
