Restorative and Enhancement Cyborgs in Modern Medicine

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Recommended: Developments with artificial hearts

I am a cyborg; today we live in a world of cyborgs. This makes statements such as these much more common. In the past cyborgs were consider freaks of nature and were one in a billion. Recently our society is has become no longer worried with whether you are a cyborg or not but rather what type of cyborg you are. Cyborg technologies have invaded nearly every aspect of our lives, including technologies such as vaccination, insulin pump, artificial organs, etc.

For decades, cyborgs have been exclusively associated with science fiction and fantasy; only in the futuristic genre can the organic and inorganic combine to form a cognitive being. In novels and in other forms of media, scientists are like gods that present humans with unimaginable enhancements, thus making them greater than the average human. Cyborgs are given the rep as tangled creations of human flesh and metal, which possess incredible strength, speed, or increased mental capacity. These cyborgs are praised and glamorized as so called super humans that are distinguished as a different species that has evolved by the hands of man. Although cyborgs seem to come from the imagination, there are cyborgs walking and living among us. They are not the advertised plated metal humans and they do not talk in robotic voices, but are like regular humans. These cyborgs are medical cyborgs. Some of them have mechanical devices implanted in their ears to help with hearing and overcome deafness, wear contacts, have an insulin pump to help control diabetes, or have an artificial heart to maintain the circulation of blood in their body. Producing a medical cyborg is a collaboration of medicine and technology to enhance or restore human biological processes.

For centuries, man ...

... middle of paper ...

...tor, or a second type of man that is built against nature and possess super human powers. Although these changes are incorporating machine into man, the purpose is to restore or replicate normal biological processes in reality, and not create the man envisioned in the works of science fictions.

Works Cited

Clynes, M.E., Kline, N.S. “Cyborgs and Space”. The Cyborg Handbook. New

York, New York: Routledge, 1995.

Gaffney, F., and Fenton, Barry J. “Barney B Clark, DDS: A View From the

Medical Service”. The Cyborg Handbook. New York, New York:

Routledge, 1995.

Gray, Chris. H. “Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic

Organisms” The Cyborg Handbook. New York, New York: Routledge, 1995.

Klugman, Craig M. “From Cyborg Fiction to Medical Reality”. Literature and

Medicine. 20, no. 1 (Spring 2001). The Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2001.

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