ABSTRACT
One of the most important events in American civilization has been the rise of the reporter.
Robert E.Park (1940)
If we are to look for the origins of modern sociology, remarked Foucault, we should not read the work of Comte or Montesquieu but instead look to the rather more mundane practices of doctors. Why doctors? One reason is that in the early nineteenth century doctors became, according to Foucault, ‘specialists of space’. They practised not just within the enclosed spaces of the hospital, the medical school and the operating theatre but in the relatively open spaces of cities and towns. And they raised questions not just about the health and pathology of the individual body, but about the environment of the collective body: the quality of hygiene and climate, the density of habitation and the rate of migration of peoples and diseases (Foucault 1980, pp. 150-1).
