The Clinic

Abstract

Medicine is a central figure in three of Foucault’s books: in Histoire de la Folie, as we saw in the previous chapter, obviously in The Birth of the Clinic, and in The History of Sexuality — even though the book is about sexuality and power relations. Besides, Foucault’s approach to medical discourse is unusual. For he is, by and large, not concerned with medical discourses alone, still less with their history. Rather, his interest in them is based on problems which cut across them. For example, his analysis of the 18th-century medicine of madness is part of a wider analysis of the modes of treatment of madmen. In The History of Sexuality, medical and psychiatric discourses on sexuality are seen as one strand of varied discourses on sexuality in the 19th century. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault places medical discourses in a wider network of concern with the health of the population; movements of medical reform; the training of doctors and their professional organisation; regimes of assistance and internment. In keeping with Foucault’s analysis, an illuminating approach to the emergence of modern medicine would be to see it as one strand of a more general process of the increase concern with the health and welfare of the population (the police, in the terminology of the 18th and 19th-century literature); and the displacement of non-therapeutic treatment (such as that of madmen in the 18th century) and non-medical cures by medical treatment — in short, a process of the ‘medicalization’ of society. Thus, we begin with two strands of events, one specific and one general.