ABSTRACT
The principle that medical knowledge formed for itself at the very bedside of the patient does not date from the end of the eighteenth century. Many, if not all, the revolutions in medicine have been carried through in the name of this experience, presented as primary source and constant norm. But what was constantly changing was the very grid according to which this experience was given, was articulated into analysable elements, and found a discursive formulation. Not only the names of diseases, not only the grouping of systems were not the same; but the fundamental perceptual codes that were applied to patients’ bodies, the field of objects to which observation addressed itself, the surfaces and depths traversed by the doctor’s gaze, the whole system of orientation of this gaze also varied.
