Technological solutions to bodily decline are on the rise. The annual physical exam at the doctor’s office is being replaced by wearables that provide continuous feedback on our fitness as we move through our daily lives. Devices like smartwatches, continuous glucose monitors, biosensor patches, and self-care apps, and concepts like digital biomarkers, digital phenotypes, and digital twins have enabled a new paradigm of virtual health to emerge, based on the idea that our bodies can be understood as data. But the logic of virtual care only emphasizes aspects of illness and wellness that can be sensed and counted by computational devices, while excluding other forms of human experience that are not easily quantified. The virtual patient appears as a dataset of disembodied computational renderings – a human without the messy unpredictability of humanity. How can the care of a physical body, with its dependence on food and water, its need for warmth and touch, its vulnerability to injury and its sensitivity to the surrounding environment, be reduced to the exchange of disembodied digital signals? In this lecture, Professor Ostherr will discuss the interplay between the dream and the material, technological reality of virtual health.