Recently, it has been suggested that the development and implementation of innovative information technologies are driving a significant transformation in healthcare, and bring about the future or a new paradigm of medicine. However, this discourse of expectation on computerized medicine has been an illusion that has been repeated for more than 50 years; such “medicine of the future” has yet been realized in Japan. This presentation explores why healthcare has not been radically transformed by the introduction of information technology despite prophetic expectations over the past half-century, and why such illusions persist even though the concept of "computerized medicine" has never been fulfilled. The analysis is based on a study of the contemporary history of medicine and computing in Japan. Centuries before the advancements in information and communication technology in the latter half of the 20th century, modern medicine was established on a scientific foundation within societies moving towards capitalism and democratization. Greene, the medical historian, criticized the influence of capitalism as a driving force behind the hype. However, although Japanese healthcare has been less capitalistic than that of the United States, the vision of computerized medicine has been promoted even more strongly and persistently. This presentation attempts to indicate that not only the capitalist market, but also the democratization of healthcare, served as motivations for the adoption of information technology in Japan, and that transformations in biomedical science were mistakenly generalized into medical practice.The dream of a new paradigm in medicine was, in reality, a project of "old modernity."

Georges Canguilhem argued that the concepts of normal and pathological cannot be defined solely by numerical averages, as the theoretical boundaries of normality remain undetermined. Despite this, modern medicine has established various indices to delineate normal and pathological states. How are these numerical boundaries defined?
This study explores the historical development of quantifying human body components and establishing numerical standards. In the nineteenth century, clinical pathologists began analyzing substances in body fluids, such as blood and urine, measuring their quantities in both normal and pathological states. However, these early studies presumed that pathological values existed outside the observed data, avoiding the definition of clear numerical boundaries.
A significant shift occurred in the twentieth century when clinical laboratory medicine introduced the concept of "normal values." Initially, these values represented the quantity of a substance in a normal state. However, over time, this concept evolved into a statistical range derived from sample data, wherein measurements falling outside this range were classified as pathological.
This historical analysis highlights the pivotal role of statistical methods in creating the perception that the challenge of defining numerical boundaries between normal and pathological states has been resolved.

Many of the newest and biggest changes in dietary and wellness culture from the past two decades have been driven by the architecture of digital platforms imagined and manufactured by tech elites. Not by coincidence, Silicon Valley (and the financial culture that has grown to support it) has itself become a hotbed of unusual health and wellness practices–not least because the tech industry devalues traditional forms of expertise so as to elevate its own ‘disruptive’ capacity. These developments cannot be understood as the product of linear technological progression, rather, they are reflective of the local culture and value-systems that informed the development of the World Wide Web and personal computation.

This presentation will examine the roots of this phenomenon by critically analyzing the wellness politics laced throughout the Whole Earth Catalog, a hugely influential countercultural magazine that ran from the late 60s to the late 90s, which Steve Jobs famously likened to “a paperback form” of Google. We argue that the peculiar hybrid of Bay Area-derived environmentalism and hypermasculine productivity culture in Silicon Valley has driven much of the tech industry’s thinking (and anxiety) about the future of health. Specifically, we will discuss how techno-chauvinist attitudes (Braussard) and neoliberal rhetorics intersected locally in the early stages of Silicon Valley’s rise to produce global attitudes about health and wellness. With its insistence that self-education and consumerism could serve as a gateway to bodily empowerment, this presentation will demonstrate that the Catalog served as an important model for contemporary wellness culture.

Dr Kathleen Weisse