Your Stethoscope, My Soul: What Diagnostic Technology Teaches Us About Human Nature

Abstract: Evidence-based medical reasoning tends to favor diagnostic measures like biomarkers and quantified values because they are discrete and amenable to probability analyses and diagnostic thresholds. In the modern clinic, symptoms and subjective evidence need to be ‘translated,’ as Richard Zaner puts it, into the language of repeatable sign before the ‘real’ work of diagnosis begins. Thus, the artificial products used in diagnosis and the ways of thinking that beget and employ them determine what counts as disease and its correlates, health and illness. The philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, describes how we program certain tendencies in our devices that are fitted to our purposes and integrated into our culture. However, when technical objects become ‘naturalized,’ we find that it is now our culture that must adapt to them and integrate their tendencies. This process of concretization transforms how we think about reality and understand our nature, remaking the human in the image of his technology. In this presentation, I argue that the technics of evidence-based diagnosis fundamentally transform how we think about what it means to be healthy and flourish as humans. To that end, I will first consider a brief history of diagnostic tools and methods. Then, I will demonstrate that these entail particular ontologies of disease. Finally, I will argue that the understanding of health and illness inherited by our modern diagnostics shapes our culture of medicine into one that tends to be more interested in curing broken bodies than caring for whole persons.