The Birth Of The Clinic Summary

BOOK REVIEW: THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC – ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEDICAL PERCEPTION, BY MICHEL FOUCAULT

Name of the Book: The Birth of the Clinic - Archaeology of Medical Perception, London: Routledge

Author: Michel Foucault, (Translated by A. M. Sheridan)

Year of Publication: 1973 (French version published in 1963)

INTRODUCTION

"This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze." Hence, begins The Birth of the Clinic: An archaeology of medical perception by Michel Foucault. In this book, Foucault talks about the understanding of life, death and disease in modern times. He says that it is not just a biology and cannot be understood from only biological perspective, but also economics, geography, politics

There have been, and will be, other distributions of illness." He implies that there is an interpretive grid of medical perception and it involves specific configuration. Hence the questions like "where does it hurt?" do not fit in that grid. Foucault talked about classificatory medicine as in primary spatialization-the individual body, secondary spatialization-the presence of disease in the human body, and tertiary spatialization-social network in which disease and its management takes

While talking about reforms, he says that it is not just that the balance of medicine was shifted in the direction of clinic but it was also counterbalanced by theoretical teaching and then relates that knowledge to an encyclopaedic whole. Thus clinical medicine is not concerned with seeking to reduce all its knowledge and teaching to observation and thus medicine cannot be defined as clinical unless there is no encylopaedic knowledge of nature and man in society. In Paris when poverty was too widespread, need of new structure was felt for preservation of hospitals and privileges of medicine to be consonant with liberalism as well as social protection. This was nothing but both protection of poor by the rich and protection of rich against the poor. In the era of economic freedom, there was a progressive reversal i.e. interest paid by poor was used by rich to invest in hospital. Hospital became feasible for private initiative the moment sickness turned into a spectacle. Hence helping ended up by