The Birth of the Clinic
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Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Michel Foucault |
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| Original title | Naissance de la clinique |
| Translator | Alan Sheridan |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Published |
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| Media type | |
| OCLC | 12214239 |
| Preceded by | Madness and Civilization |
| Followed by | The Order of Things |
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (French: Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical) is a 1963 book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. First published in French in 1963, the work was published in English translation by Alan Sheridan Smith in the United States in 1973, followed in the UK in 1976 by Tavistock Publications as part of the series World of Man edited by R. D. Laing. In continuous publication since 1963, the book has become a of the history of medicine, with admirers and critics in equal measure.
Developing the themes explored in his previous work, Madness and Civilization, Foucault traces the development of the medical profession, and specifically the institution of the clinique (translated as "clinic", but here largely referring to teaching hospitals). Its central points are the concept of the medical regard ("medical gaze") and the sudden re-organisation of knowledge at the end of the 18th century, which would be expanded in his next major work, The Order of Things.
Foucault coined the term "medical gaze" to denote the dehumanizing medical separation of the patient's body from the patient's person (identity); (see mind-body dualism). He uses the term in a genealogy describing the creation of a field of knowledge of the body. The material and intellectual structures that made possible the analysis of the body were mixed with power interests: in entering the field of knowledge, the human body also entered the field of power, becoming a possible target for manipulation. Originally, the term "medical gaze" was confined to post-modern and post-structuralist academic use, but it is now frequently used in graduate medical and social work courses.
Foucault also argued that the French and American revolutions that spawned modernity also created a "meta-narrative" of scientific discourse that held scientists, specifically medical doctors, as sages who would in time abolish sickness and so solve all of humanity's problems. For the nineteenth-century moderns, medical doctors replaced the discredited medieval clergy; physicians save bodies, not souls. This myth was part of the greater discourse of the humanist and Enlightenment schools of thought that believed the human body to be the sum of a person: biological reductionism that became a powerful tool of the new sages: through thorough examination (gazing) of a body, a doctor deduces symptom, illness, and cause, therefore achieving unparalleled understanding of the patient — hence, the doctor's medical gaze was believed to penetrate surface illusions, in near-mystical discovery of hidden truth.
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