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Sebastian Moreno
September 30, 2003
Tai Chi and Chinese Thought
Nickerson
Foucault Review
Michel Foucault begins his interesting book, The Birth of the Clinic by bringing his readers back to late eighteenth century France, a time and place before the modern concepts of bio-chemical medicine ruled the land. ...
Epidemics were events, according to Foucault, that emerged in areas in which the individual constitutions of bodies was susceptible to the natural occurrence of disease; meaning, that epidemics were not looked upon as diseases but as an abnormally large amount of people in any given area developing the same but unrelated ailment. ... Hospitals were in disarray, thus Foucault proposes one of his main ideas, that the diseased patient should be treated in his neutral zone, zone of comfort, the family. Thus, the birth of the clinic is manifested. “If the family was bound to the unfortunate individual by the natural duty of compassion, the nation was bound to him by the social, collective duty to provide assistance”(Foucault 40).
I feel that Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic is less of a dogmatic statement of what he believes is proper medicine than it is an attempt to undermine the almost universally accepted principle that the history of the scientific medical practice is due to a constant increase of knowledge. Foucault would likely argue (and does in The Birth of the Clinic) that medical history is more the process of sudden and drastic changes in a societies methods of discourse.
Approximate Word count = 1118
Approximate Pages = 4.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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