ABSTRACT
In 1963, two years after Folie et déraison appeared, Foucault published two monographs on very different topics. One, Death and the Labyrinth, was a critical study of Raymond Roussel, a French poet, dramatist and novelist whose experimental works, written around the time of the First World War, were much admired both by the surrealists and by French new novelists of the sixties. The other, The Birth of the Clinic, was a history of medicine during the period of the French Revolution.1 These works, so apparently dissimilar, have a single impulse: they both explore the history and signification of death in modernity, and, by virtue of this alone, share something with the earlier works on dreams and madness. The Birth of the Clinic offers a detailed description of the medical management of life and death at the end of the eighteenth century, while the monograph on Roussel is a critical examination of an extraordinary moment in what Foucault thinks of as life’s colonization of Being, inaugurated in the Revolutionary era. It is as if the two sides of Madness and Civilization, its literary or existential and its historical aspects, can no longer cohere in a single book when Foucault comes to focus on life and death rather than reason and madness. In this chapter I outline Foucault’s work on medicine, dealing with the Roussel book in the next chapter. Because that work forms the basis for his later account of power in modern society, I have elaborated it a little by connecting it to the history of public health in Britain during the nineteenth century. And I bring some medical history into connection with literature by offering a brief reading of’ three canonical, nineteenthcentury, realist novels.
