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The Birth Of The Clinic Summary

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BOOK REVIEW: THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC – ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEDICAL PERCEPTION, BY MICHEL FOUCAULT Name of the Book: The Birth of the Clinic - Archaeology of Medical Perception, London: Routledge Author: Michel Foucault, (Translated by A. M. Sheridan) Year of Publication: 1973 (French version published in 1963) INTRODUCTION "This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze." Hence, begins The Birth of the Clinic: An archaeology of medical perception by Michel Foucault. In this book, Foucault talks about the understanding of life, death and disease in modern times. He says that it is not just a biology and cannot be understood from only biological perspective, but also economics, geography, politics …show more content…

There have been, and will be, other distributions of illness." He implies that there is an interpretive grid of medical perception and it involves specific configuration. Hence the questions like "where does it hurt?" do not fit in that grid. Foucault talked about classificatory medicine as in primary spatialization-the individual body, secondary spatialization-the presence of disease in the human body, and tertiary spatialization-social network in which disease and its management takes …show more content…

While talking about reforms, he says that it is not just that the balance of medicine was shifted in the direction of clinic but it was also counterbalanced by theoretical teaching and then relates that knowledge to an encyclopaedic whole. Thus clinical medicine is not concerned with seeking to reduce all its knowledge and teaching to observation and thus medicine cannot be defined as clinical unless there is no encylopaedic knowledge of nature and man in society. In Paris when poverty was too widespread, need of new structure was felt for preservation of hospitals and privileges of medicine to be consonant with liberalism as well as social protection. This was nothing but both protection of poor by the rich and protection of rich against the poor. In the era of economic freedom, there was a progressive reversal i.e. interest paid by poor was used by rich to invest in hospital. Hospital became feasible for private initiative the moment sickness turned into a spectacle. Hence helping ended up by

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But the pain didn’t go away until she went again and again and, “Henrietta told her doctors several times that she thought the cancer was spreading, that she could feel it moving through her, but they found nothing wrong with her.” (“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, Chapter 8, Page 62 by Rebecca Skloot). She had a feeling that something was wrong with her because she felt a lot of pain in her vaginal area and it was not normal. The doctors knew that something was wrong but refused to tell her. “This was a time when ‘benevolent deception’ was a common practice- doctors often withheld even the most fundamental information from their patients, sometimes not giving them any diagnosis at all.

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It also affirms the Muslims’ aspiration towards better lives for themselves, describing how the Arab leaders wanted their illnesses treated by competent doctors, not by random citizens. This prompted the establishment of a medical examination for potential doctors, which definitely had a positive effect on the Muslim medical field, based on the incredible medical advances made during this time. All of these advances also resulted in the creation of many new medical books. Document 3 describes a multi-volume medical encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine, that was particularly influential. These books, once translated into European languages and passed onto the doctors of Europe, was the standard for medical knowledge in schools until the 18th century, proving how advanced the Arab’s medical discoveries were for their time.

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Free market reforms took over, as the government removed itself from funding hospitals and health services (Brink, 2015). Health care organizations turned into for-profit institutions, and healthcare workers were rewarded for increasing profits of hospitals (Mitsuhashi, 2005). The barefoot doctors promptly declined for they lost the trust of their local communities, reducing the numbers of patients they saw and transforming their practice to a more lucrative high paying practice that was becoming more popular in rural areas (Woodruff, 1986). The effects of these reforms had an extreme impact on Chinese citizens; in 1999 the number of rural people with health insurance was reduced to only 7% (Brink, 2015). The general distrust that was formed between citizens and healthcare professionals led to an extremely unstable society, plagued with discontent and anger towards the Chinese government.

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