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Concept
The Birth of the Clinic
Summary
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical, 1963), by Michel Foucault, presents the development of la clinique, the teaching hospital, as a medical institution, identifies and describes the concept of Le regard médical ("the medical gaze"), and the epistemic re-organisation of the research structures of medicine in the production of medical knowledge, at the end of the eighteenth century. Although originally limited to the academic discourses of post-modernism and post-structuralism, the medical gaze term is used in graduate medicine and social work.
In the genealogy of medicine—knowledge about the human body—the term Le regard médical (The medical gaze) identifies the doctor’s practice of objectifying the body of the patient, as separate and apart from his or her personal identity. In the treatment of illness, the intellectual and material structures of la clinique, the teaching hospital, made possible the inspection, examination, and analysis of the human body, yet the clinic was part of the socio-economic interests of power. Therefore, when the patient’s body entered the field of medicine, it also entered the field of power where the patient can be manipulated by the professional authority of the medical gaze.
In the 18th century, when the French (1789–1799) and the American (1775–1783) revolutions inaugurated the Modern era those events also established a meta-narrative of scientific discourse that presented scientists as sages—specifically, the medical doctors—who would abolish sickness and resolve the problems of humanity. By that cultural perception, 19th-century society replaced the scientifically discredited mediaeval clergy with medical doctors. The myth of medical sagacity was integral to the meta-narrative discourse of Humanism and of the Age of Enlightenment (17th–18th c.)—a historical period when people believed that the human body was the person.
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