The Birth of the Clinic

The Birth of Clinic charts the dramatic transformation of medical knowledge which took place in the eighteenth century, when medicine took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped.  Disease became subject to new rules of classification.  And doctors began to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.   Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes--in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution.  Brilliant and provocative, this books sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of heath and sickness, life and death.  Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith.



"Learned [and] rewarding... The Birth of the Clinic continues [Focault's] brilliant history, not of ideas as such, but of the structures of perception."--The New York Times Book Review

"The Birth of Clinic attempts a minor revolution in medical-history writing...Foucault's research is overwhelming and affords the reader considerable entertainment as well as insight."--Yale Review