Michel Foucault Birth of the Clinic Chs. 9-10

Questions:

P. 175 -  Foucault emphasizes the distinction between "seat" and "essence" of disease.  How are we to understand this distinction?

P. 189 - Multiple senses of "essence" need to be  tracked here ("essential diseases" and "essences of diseases").

P. 189 - How do we understand the being of the disease given the "disappearance" of the nosological essence? 

P. 185 (&c) - What are the different conceptions/definitions of fever?   And how do these map to broader (more general) distinctions that Foucault is making?

P. 192 - "The historical and concrete a priori" of the modern medical gaze (cf. xv).

Throughout the book, medical experience is a concept Foucault relies on.

• What are the various layers or levels of medical experience in this concept?  How do we understand medical experience at the end of the book?
• Who is the subject of experience in this book?  Who is the subject of perception?
• How do we understand medical experience at the end of the book?

 

Discussion:

On page 190 MF discusses the "dissolution of the ontology of fever" is the "best-known element of the analysis".  This "negative" moment is "merely" a "negative counterpart" of a "positive element" whih is the idea of physiological method applied to organic illness.  (This is a very dialectical statement in Foucault.)

From "a being of the disease" to a notion of disease as a "complex movement".  A de-essentialized theory of disease constitutes "the whole essence of the pathological".

• Shift from a medicine of diseases to a medicine of the pathological.
  

What is the relationship between the life/death and the normal/pathological pair?

• Disease reconfigured as a process becomes a tendency toward death.
• Only in the encounter with death, can the relation between disease and life become pathological, through the path of organs
  
•  

Prior to anatomo-clinical medicine, death existed (surely) but not as a depth condition for disease as the pathological.  Death was previously not a part of the savoir of the medical gaze.

• From a classificatory essentialist theory of diseases; to a scalar conception of disease along a scale of normal to pathological
• But this scalar conception needs death as one of its poles