Book, Birth of the Clinic, 7/11[LS]

The beginning of the 19th century marks the moment when medicine, criticizing its past and justifying its originality, presented itself as scientific medicine. How to characterize this fundamental transformation in the organization of medical knowledge and its practice Michel Foucault seeks to answer this question by demonstrating that the rupture that took place in medical knowledge is not due basically to a conceptual refinement, nor to the use of more powerful technical instruments, but to a change at the level of its objects, concepts and methods. The new type of configuration that characterizes modern medicine implies the emergence of new forms of knowledge and new institutional practices. This work, part of a broad and ambitious project of historical-philosophical criticism of the political and epistemological structures that preside over the rationality of the contemporary world, thus discovers, at the level of medicine, a very important trajectory to account for the constitution of human and social sciences and the establishment of the type of power characteristic of capitalist societies.