Birth of the Clinic, Ch. 1: 10/8 meeting

The group began, as usual, with questions: 

 1. “The ‘glance’ has simply to exercise its right of origin over truth” (4). How is Foucault understanding origin and truth in this chapter/book?

2. Shift from classificatory medicine. How is Foucault explaining shift from classificatory to pathological-anatomical medicine? How does this relate to tertiary spatialization (16)? How do MF’s methodological commitments from the preface limit/constrain what kinds of explanations he can offer?

3. Clarity on spatialization vs. spaces (20), as part of the transition.

4. Tertiary spatiailzation (16) vis-a-vis primary and secondary spitalization (17). What is TS? What kind of concepts is Foucault operating with here? Historical epistemological postulates? Or a kind of metaphysical nominalism?

5. Space of localization of illness verus configuration of illness. Thinking about illness prior to, or outside of, individual patient, person, etc..

6. Relating space of localization to space of configuration. Causality as a link. 

7. MF’s anti-modern rhetoric visible in some of the sentences. What do we make of this? Is this part of an intentional polemics on MF’s part to draw attention to the dark sides of modernity? If not, what can we infer about MF’s practice of critique from this? Does his work achieve his ends?

Discussion then ensued: 

 Eighteenth-century classificatory medicine involves three kinds of spatialization.

* Primary spatialization - locating disease on a table or via classification on a table in terms of homologies, a flat “two-dimensional space” (9) - “spatialization of configuration” (3)

* Secondary spatialization - problem of locating a classified disease “in an organism” (10) - “spatialization of localization” in the body (3).

* Tertiary spatialization - social setting [but we need to say more here, or maybe MF does]; “forms of a social space” (16); “a whole corpus of medical practices and institutions confronts the primary and secondary spatializations with forms of a social space” (16) - MF locates the explanation for the shift here, in the tertiary spatialization’s shift from a family-located practice of assistance to a nationalization of medicine and the birth fo the clinic [“hospital”] (18-19)

Later on, chapter 2 will track other kinds of spatializations, with rise of anatamo-clinical medicine. 

In classificatory medicine, the tertiary spatialization is amorphous, often located in the family (but not only there), whereas in later clinical medicine the tertiary spatialization gets consolidated in the hospital.

We ended by marking a few reminders of questions we have for ch. 2 and beyond: 

What happens with the spatializaiton category in ch. 2 (and beyond)?

Will MF highlight, or attend to, the possible continuities from 18c. medicine to 19c. medicine in later chapters? Or will he only highlight discontinuities. Transition from classificatory to clinical medicine vis-a-vis MF’s claim that classificatory opened up the possibility for clinical medicine (4).

How will MF track multiple registers of knowledge/perception? (E.g., the two spatializations.)

How does the social/political (what MF will later call power) intersect as another register?

What happens to the amorphous space of the social and how it relates to consolidation of medicine in the hospital?