A new system of medicine is posting across the net, aiding and abetting the appropriation of the practice of medicine by the computer. Computerised axial tomography arrived in the late 1970s and soon after, magnetic resonance and positron emission technologies were digitalised, computerised and medicalised. Those new body-imaging capabilities gave such a boost to diagnostic confidence that doctors took to sending their “headaches” for brain scans and their hypochondriacs for “pan-man-scans” instead of referring them for consultant opinions. The scanners took work away from the specialists in the last century, and come the new millennium, the user-friendly computer was dashing…