The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

“The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic is anything but a conventional history of the development of the modern doctor’s office. It is, rather, an attempt to show how the doctor’s gaze at the patient’s body evolved from the time of the ancien regime to the early nineteenth century.In true Foucault fashion, the body that the doctor sees is not the same in different eras. Instead of a growth in understanding of physiology and morbidities what is seen is a different body each time.It’s impossible to argue with Foucault. Or at least one would have as detailed a knowledge of French medical practice in this era. As he elaborates the demise of essentialism of diseases, the understanding of systems within the human body, the way the stethoscope expanded the ambit of the doctors’s gaze its easy to follow along with his guiding motif that the gaze is evolving and not simply deeper medical knowledge.But, for what it’s worth, in the end I was unconvinced. I couldn’t help but think that if Foucault was a less gifted writer, these genealogies would be regarded as an exercise in esoterica. And, in the end, is there such a great difference between a deeper medical knowledge that enables one to see the human body more accurately and a truly different body revealing itself under the doctor’s gaze?Of course, I’m more of a toy poodle nipping at an intellectual giant. Foucault is always stimulating and always worth reading. But perhaps it is not only I who wonder whether this titan of thought got somewhat overly caught up in his overriding philosophical vision.

Read this for my medical anthropology course. It’s a bit dense and slightly pretentious in that not everyone can read this book due to its complex concepts and vocabulary. Overall, once I understood what I was reading, it became not just another “textbook”, but valuable literature in understanding how our current medical system functions.

It's a book. I read it. It sits on a shelf now and makes me look smart.

Must read for every medical school students and their patients!

Much as I love love love Discipline and Punish and enjoyed Madness and Civilization, I found this excruciating and tedious. Foucault just bounces all over the place, trying to tie together various observations about space, seeing, family, empiricism and medical reforms with no clear goal or overall project. I loved the strong, accessible style of discipline and punish, but Birth of the Clinic has a really weak, meandering quality to it, maybe because it's one of Foucault's earlier works. Which is not to say that Foucault doesn't make some smart observations in it, he does, but they seem isolated and never really fall into whatever the broader project of this work is meant to be

My daughter finds it, quite not exactly all she would have look for and love. Thanks you any way, a book is always a good gift.

Some consider it one of his most important books in explicating his views.

for anyone who has ever been stuck in a waiting room, and felt like an object, this is a must read

In perfect good state and arrived on time.

Good