Drawing on Foucault's (1977) analysis of 'political anatomy', Armstrong (1983; 1995) argues that the 20 th Century marked a shift in the clinical gaze, from a focus on the interior of the body, to a focus that both explored the body in relation to its exterior and to the collective body. Armstrong (1995) describes this new mechanism of power as 'surveillance medicine'. In what others have described as medicalisation (Illich 1975), or healthism (Crawford 1980), this extended medical gaze has redrawn the boundaries between health, illness and disease to promote a regime of total health. Under this regime, the individual is not just subjected to the technologies of medical surveillance, but is expected to engage in the practice of self-surveillance. By the beginning of the 21 st Century, Surveillance Studies are highlighting how contemporary surveillance is neither limited, nor specific, in either scope or design (Lyon 2002). The digital revolution has taken mass surveillance from a possibility to a reality. From cradle to grave, the medical surveillance of the human body has, for many, taken on a routinisation that has served to normalise the political anatomy of the body. Increased health surveillance, biotechnology and geneticisation (Lippman 1991), as well as anxieties caused by globalisation (Kawachi and Gamala 2006), have contributed to the reinforcement and extension of the continuum between health, illness and disease-in what some have described as a 'dangerous future' (Macintyre 1995; Brand 2005). The notion that mass surveillance as a practice or regime is something that is objectively imposed upon passive, medicalised bodies is challenged. Tulle-Winton (2000) argues that the dispersion of power necessarily contains the possibility of resistance. By this he means that because individuals are all variably involved in his, or her, own regulation it is possible for people to resist the process. Indeed, over forty years ago, Roth (1963) argued that while the power to define markers of recovery from TB were located in the medical domain, patients did not act as passive bodies waiting for qualities to be awarded to them; rather they participated in the interpretation of signs and symptoms. Diagnosis has always contained a subtle blend of signs and symptoms repressed or exhibited when an individual engages in medical discourse and medical surveillance. In this special edition of Surveillance & Society we ask whether increasing medical surveillance does, indeed, constitute a dangerous future and what that future might hold. In particular, this special edition seeks to explore the interplay between surveillance as reassurance and obligation on the one hand, and resistance and negotiation on the other. In the first article, Martin French explores the globalisation of public health surveillance, in particular, focusing on surveillance within the context of a (post)cold-war discourse. Exposing the militaristic language of contemporary disease surveillance (informed, also, by Sontag's (1977) discussion of military
