The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception Books
- ISBN13: 9780679753346
- Shape up: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that may possibly be mapped. Disease became theme to new rules of classification. And doctors start to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.
In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the right heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we reckon of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes — in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.
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Here is a commentary:
Reviewer: A reader from California May 17, 1998 “Again, Foucault shatters our illusions.This book examines our cultural tendency to elevate the authority of the physician…” This reviwer’s summary of the book is incorrect because the work is not a study of power or “authority” (themes which would be vital in Foucault’s later works). In “The Birth of the Clinic” we see how Foucault MIGHT HAVE made a crticism of clinical medicine as an authoritarian institution, but in fact this is NOT the focus of the book. This book is not the attempt to dispel a “myth”, it is a description of the reality of the development of the clinical stare as a discursive formation distinct from its historical predecessors.
Reviewer: spandex9@aol.com from Barbaraville, Manitoba (Canada) July 21, 1998. “Structures of Perception and Positivism Questioned”. This review is much closer to the mark than the first one. In particular, in the second paragraph the reviewer touches on the implications of the development of anatomo-clinical medicine for “the human experience itself”. In the conclusion to the book Foucault himself stated that “the experience of individuality in modern culture is linked to the experience of death” and that is one reason why we should be interested in this work.
Reviewer: Dr. W Y Wan from Hong Kong “A book with unique insight– one that you cannot miss. I agree that this book can be of value to physicians who are genuinely interested in human welfare, and it’s unfortunate that most physicians never study the humanities during their educations.
Rating: 5 / 5
Wow, Foucault is truly a literary genius. Getting a small glimpse into his wonderful genius is pleasure enough to warrant reading this book. But that said The Birth of the Clinic lacks in certain areas. Observably, Foucault is writing in the postmodern era, thus his thoughts are not near as groundbreaking as they would have been had he been writing 30-40 years earlier. This book, as Foucault explicitly states, is not so much about the birth of the clinic, as it is about the birth of thoughts and knowledge – how conceptions of excellent and terrible science come to be. In that regard the book, unfortunately the book falters in comparison to some others. The one I have in mind is Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. The main difference between the two is in time of release. Kuhn’s book was released immediately after the Second World War. Subsequently, due to the nascent phase of the field, his book sets the foundation for the literature to follow in its tradition – such as The Birth of the Clinic. Therefore, readers interested in the development of scientific knowledge would be better served to pick up Kuhn’s book first, then go onto The Birth of the Clinic.
Even as an introduction to the topic is to some extent helpful, the value of this book must not be overlooked. Your impression of medicine will not be the same.
Rating: 5 / 5
” The birth of the Clinic ” is an attempt by the philosopher and the learned historian to decipher the secret of medical perception. Only when the chaotic and subjective clinical experience is transcended to the objective language, we have the medicine as a scientific theme as today. As a physician myself , I reckon understanding ” clinical stare ” helps me to define the place of modern medicine, of doctors and patients and of medical organisation in this quick changing world.
Rating: 5 / 5
Birth of the Clinic is a partner to Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. They are both about political economy and the irony of how the modern ‘free’ world is as confining as previous historical eras just in an opposite way. This is kind of Foucault’s whole mission, to show us just how confined we really are and wake us up to reality. But he is everlastingly subtle about it. In a way his ‘philosophy’ and ‘methodology’ and the wild theoretical tangents the academies have taken it to, are a mask for his very powerful and even perilous political indictments. In Discipline and Punish (Surveil in French) Foucault shows historically how individual time and space have been controlled by the ever evolving, profit-driven, techno-efficiency of the panopticon-state and the distracted aquiescence of its subjects. In Birth of the Clinic he will show historically how the individual person and their body have become property of the state via consensus (law) and the same somnambulent aquiescence. In many ways Foucault is a major conservative showing us empirically, through historical evidence, how the power-play of today is an interiorization of past power-relationships, interiorized to the top of invisibility and largely unacknowledged by the manipulated masses.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book examines our cultural tendency to elevate the authority of the physician. It introduces the concept of the clinical stare and describes the way the myth of this stare was developed in the early Enlightenment atmosphere and fostered the birth of the clinic. A detailed online summary by Lois Shawver, with excerpts and page numbers, can be found through some of the standard search engines.
Rating: 5 / 5