ABSTRACT
Ill health was imaged within the body and the clinical gaze, as described by Foucault,31 allowed modern medicine to read localised signs and symptoms to identify the cause within the body. This detailed scrutiny or panopticism, surveillance and monitoring of the body produced a discrete, passive, individualised body as the object of medical science.32 Armstrong in his detailed Foucauldian analysis of 20th century medical knowledge summarises this view of political anatomy:
The modern body of the patient, which has become the unquestioned object of clinical practice, has no social existence prior to those same clinical techniques being exercised upon it. It is as if the medical gaze, in which is encompassed all the techniques, languages and assumptions of modern medicine, establishes by its authority and penetration an observable and analysable space in which is crystallised that apparently solid figure – which has now become as familiar – the discrete human body.33
