"Learned [and] rewarding...The Birth of the Clinic continues [Foucault's] brilliant history, not of ideas
as such, but of the of perception."
-- The New York Times Book Review
Random House, Inc. Web Site, March, 2002
Summary
In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge 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 begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained
below the threshold of the visible and expressible.
In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts
this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel 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, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins
of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.