The Biomedical body

The biomedical body is a body. No one can deny that.

It is a body like the one we see in the image chosen to accompany this post: anatomical, exposed, legible, observable. A body made of structures, organs, tissues, functions. A body that can be opened, measured, described, diagnosed.

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And yet, perhaps, something disturbs us. Because this body is a body without a face. Or rather: it is a body for which the face is not necessary. Not because the face has been forgotten, but because, within this specific way of knowing the body, the face is simply irrelevant. Accessory. Completely useless.

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If this idea feels cold to you, if it appears inhuman, if you sense that something essential is missing from this description, do not be sad. Perhaps you have just found an important clue: you have sensed the distance between the biomedical body and the body understood holistically.

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The first is the body that medicine must turn into an object in order to “know,” “treat,” and “control” it. Knowing, treating, and controlling are all dimensions that need to be questioned.

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The second is a more complex body, broader, more difficult to reduce to a single definition. We will not address it definitively here: it will be the subject of future reflections.

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But let's start from the beginning.

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When we try to critically question the authority of biomedicine — Western medicine — that is, its ability to establish what is true, normal, healthy, or pathological, we must recognize one essential point: medical knowledge is never completely neutral.

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Modern Western medicine often presents itself as objective knowledge, grounded in data, tests, diagnostic images, and biological parameters. And to a large extent, it is. Biomedicine has made extraordinary achievements possible: more precise diagnoses, more effective treatments, life-saving interventions, prevention, and the control of many diseases.

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The problem, however, arises when we confuse this enormous technical capacity with a total truth about the body. Because, in order to become legible to medicine, the body must be translated into a specific language. It must become a set of values, functions, organs, tissues, symptoms, images, percentages, probabilities. It must be decomposed, isolated, compared against parameters of normality.

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In other words, biomedicine does not simply look at the body: it transforms it into an observable object. And this passage is fundamental.

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The point, then, is not to say that the biomedical body is “true” or “false.” The point is to understand that the biomedical body is a cultural product.

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It is not the body in its natural evidence. It is not the body as it is. It is not the body finally freed from subjective interpretations. Rather, it is a body constructed by a specific system of knowledge: that of Western modernity, technical-scientific, measuring, classificatory, normalizing.

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It is the body that becomes legible only when it can be broken down into organs, tissues, values, functions, parameters, thresholds, diagnostic images, probabilities of risk. It is the body that fully exists only when it can be translated into data. But data is never innocent. Data always arises within a question, within a method, within an instrument, within a prior idea of what matters. For this reason, what biomedicine calls “objective” is already the result of a cultural selection: it decides what to see, what to measure, what to ignore, what to consider relevant, and what to leave outside the frame.

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The biomedical body, then, is not the universal body. It is the body produced by a culture that has transformed measurement into truth, statistical normality into health, deviation into risk, the symptom into a signal to be decoded, aging into a problem to be managed.

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It is a body without a face not by chance, but by epistemological necessity: the face is not needed because it does not belong to the type of truth this system wants to produce. The story is not needed. The gaze is not needed. Desire is not needed. The world in which that body lives is not needed. And perhaps we must say this clearly: the biomedical body is not more objective than other bodies. It is simply the body made possible by a precise culture of objectivity.

A culture that, in order to appear neutral, must erase the traces of its own cultural origin. For this reason, the problem is not that biomedicine sees too little: the problem is that it passes off its own way of seeing as reality itself. It convinces us that what it measures is the body. That what it does not measure is secondary. That what does not enter the data is less true.

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But the biomedical body is not the body: it is a culturally produced version of the body.

A powerful version, certainly. But precisely for this reason, one that must be critically questioned.