ABSTRACT
Let us begin this chapter by looking at the changing nature of medicine in eighteenth century Europe. In his essay ‘The politics of health in the eighteenth-century’, Foucault (1980d) alerts us to two characteristics of eighteenth-century medicine: first, the privileging of the child and the medicalisation of the family; and, second, the promotion of hygiene as a bona fide role of the doctor which opened a new field of noso-politics in the community. Up to the eighteenth century the general hospital was a repository for not only the sick but also the poor, the mad and the destitute.
