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When I worked in a paediatric casualty department children were forever being told that after being stitched, x rayed, or covered in plaster they would be "bionic." The desire to be more machine like is apparently widespread-inevitably perhaps, in an age when technology is both idolised and feared. Medicine is strewn with mechanistic language and concepts, and the metaphor "the body is a machine" suffuses much of the language of pathology and physi-
P Hodgkin (Sat,) studied this question.