Critical Genealogies Collaboratory: Michel Foucault

Questions

Q1 - What does Foucault mean by the "two great myths"? (pp. 31-32)

Q2 - What is the relevance of the 2nd myth and "war against bad government"? (p. 33)

Q3 - In relation to the"medicine of species, what are the "systemic intersection of two series of information"? (p. 30)

Q4 - What is the distinction between medical gaze and medical consciousness?

Q5 - What is the "true sense" of epidemics within the medicine of epidemics? (p. 24)

Q6 - What is the relationship of the medicine of epidemics to sovereignty (esp. the police)? (p. 25)

Q7 - Implicit reference to Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological

Discussion

"collective perception" of an epidemic as opposed to individual perception of the medicine of species (p. 26)

"botanical model," nosology, framing as species (Ch. 1, p. 7)
Now, framing as social-political model (Ch. 2)
"The specific disease is always more or less repeated, the epidemic is never quite repeated." (p. 24) - medicine of series which becomes the clinical model

It is the state apparatus - but its not about killing, it's about saving/producing
Not yet a formation of disciplinary power (some examples below)

"But its support was not the perception of the patient in his singularity, but a collective consciousness, with all the information that intersects in it, growing in a complex, ever-proliferating way until it finally achieves the dimensions of a history, a geography, a state." (p. 29)
"And yet they played an important role: by linking medicine with the destinies of states, they revealed in it a positive significance. Instead of remaining what it was, ‘the dry, sorry analysis of millions of infirmities’, the dubious negation of the negative, it was given the splendid task of establishing in men’s lives the positive role of health, virtue, and happiness; it fell to medicine to punctuate work with festivals, to exalt calm emotions, to watch over what was read in books and seen in theatres, to see that marriages were made not out of self-interest or because of a passing infatuation, but were based on the only lasting condition of happiness, namely, their benefit to the state." (p. 34)
Still assumption is the state - in Discipline and Punish, this change in power will not be told in terms of institutions but rather techniques/technologies (sovereign power vs. disciplinary power)
BUT detach connotations of sovereignty from "police"

Earlier account - map - "In the eighteenth century, the fundamental act of medical knowledge was the drawing up of a ‘map’ (repérage): a symptom was situated within a disease, a disease in a specific ensemble, and this ensemble in a general plan of the pathological world." (p. 29)
But now: "What defines the act of medical knowledge in its concrete form is not, therefore, the encounter between doctor and patient, nor is it the confrontation of a body of knowledge and a perception; it is the systematic intersection of two series of information, each homogeneous but alien to each other—two series that embrace an infinite set of separate events, but whose intersection reveals, in its isolable dependence, the individual fact." (p. 30)

Series of information about diseases & series of information about demographic information (of populations) (?)

System of communication between doctors - state now concerned with medical knowledge

There does not seem to be a top-down organization, but a structure which emerges from struggle

"the myth of a nationalized medical profession, organized like the clergy" and "the myth of a total disappearance of disease in an untroubled, dispassionate society restored to its original state of health" (pp. 31-32)
Myth as ideal - this is what they told themselves they were doing
By getting a nationalized medical profession, we eliminate disease

What is actually produced is a society of normality?
"Nineteenth century medicine, on the other hand, was regulated more in accordance with normality than with health." (p. 35)

Critical Genealogies Collaboratory