The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

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The locus in which knowledge is formed is no longer the pathological garden where God distributed the species, but a generalized medical consciousness, diffused in space and time, open and mobile, linked to each individual existence, as well as to the collective life of the nation… “(p. 31) T]he solidity, the obscurity, the density of things closed in upon themselves, have powers of truth that they owe not to light, but to the slowness of the gaze that passes over them, around them, and gradually into them, bringing them nothing more than its own light. The residence of truth in the dark centre of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze that turns their darkness into light” (xiii-xiv). This means that the clinical gaze moves from the literally superficial – the doctor can look at your skin or in your mouth and so on – to a gaze in the broadest sense, one where the doctor can listen to your breathing or feel your temperature or pulse, and from this ‘gaze’ interpret what is going on under the surface to tissue there. The shift to a classification system of tissues is essential for this movement and such a shift fundamentally changes how medicine will be carried out. Modern medicine begins for Foucault around the time of the French Revolution, at a time when the gaze newly encompasses other factors. Time and space now mattered. Bangsa yang hidup tanpa peperangan dan keganasan tidak akan mengalami perkara-perkara di atas. Begitu juga bangsa yang kaya. Sebaliknya, rakyat marhaen pula akan menjadi mangsa despotik kuasawan. Mereka dihimpit dengan cukai yang menyebabkan mereka mengemis, kemiskinan yang hanya menguntungkan golongan atasan dan penginapan yang tidak kondusif (malahan gelandangan) yang hanya memaksa mereka untuk tidak mendirikan keluarga atau hidup dalam rupa bentuk yang sangat mengerikan!

In that light, the empiricism of the 18th and 19th centuries was not a dispassionate act of looking, noting, and reporting the disease presented before the doctor's eyes. The relationship between doctor and patient (subject and object) is not about the one who knows and the one who tells, because doctor–patient interactions are not "mindless phenomenologies" that existed before their consultation (medical discourse) as patient and doctor. [6] Clinical medicine came to exist as part of the intellectual structure that defines and organises medicine as "the domain of its experience and the structure of its rationality" as a field of knowledge. [7] the development of hospitals, the whole philosophy around hospital and disease (before that step, people were treated at home, and after that step, the rich were still treated at home and the hospital was just a mean of treating / isolating the poor) 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. [2] There is disease only in the element of the visible and therefore statable” (p. 95). Foucault qualifies, however, that “the purity of the gaze is bound up in a certain silence.” This silence is the need for a gaze unaffected by various theories, preconceptions, and other influences prejudicing interpretations of observations. He locates the space where a pure gaze is corrupted as “anterior to that of the visible” (p. 108).In the 18th century, the professional authority of the doctor was based upon his command of the organised medical knowledge of his time; in the 19th century, a doctor's authority derived from his command of the new, verifiable clinical medicine. An 18th-century doctor would examine a diseased organ as would a 19th-century doctor, yet, because of their different medical cultures, these doctors would reach different conclusions about the cause and treatment of the disease. Despite their perceptual differences of diagnosis, each medical report would be "true", because each doctor diagnosed according to a generally accepted way of thinking (an episteme) in which their respective forms of organised medical knowledge were considered factual. Hence, despite their medical researches having occurred thirty years apart, the father of anatomical pathology, Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771), and the father of histology, Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), did not practise the same human anatomy. [8] See also [ edit ]

The history of illness to which he is reduced is necessary to his fellow men because it teaches them by what ills they are threatened. The gaze determined the scope of analysis possible in the clinic, which amounted to what could be seen and what could be stated, and the interdependency between these two dimensions, i.e., what could be stated was made possible by what could be seen, and what could be seen was made possible by what could be stated.

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Thomas Eakins 1875-1876 Watercolor on cardboard Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication Foucault sees pathological anatomy as a quantum leap in the modern-day clinic because of the breadth and depth the gaze acquired and the concrete knowledge generated. Thus, the medical—classificatory—gaze during this period was confined to signs and symptoms such that “paradoxically, in relation to that which he is suffering from, the patient is only an external fact; the medical reading must take him into account only to place him in parentheses” (p. 8). As a result, judgments about a patient’s condition could draw only from similarities and differences among sets of signs and symptoms laid out in pre-determined patterns—this sign goes here, that symptom goes there. Time and space have no role; never first this, then that, or here this, there that. The Shifting Gaze