ABSTRACT
In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault describes a “medicine of social space,” that emerged in the nineteenth century, wherein a political project to explicate the real nature of the social body came to mirror a scientific quest to reveal the truth of the physical body. In the space created by the convergence of medicine and politics, societies could be healthy or sick, races could be vigorous or degenerating, civilizations could be thriving or dying. This did not indicate a simple transference of biological concepts into the social world, Foucault explains, but a comprehension of the body and society in terms of the medical bipolarity of the normal and the pathological: medicine was to play an implicitly positive role, as an administration of the norm. Medicine was no longer confined to a body of techniques for diagnosing and curing ills; it assumed a normative role, distributing advice on healthy life, dictating the standards for the physical and moral relations of individuals, and thus unleashing processes that would generate the “subject” of modern power, ultimately coming to dominate the modern processes of the government of individuals and the management of populations.
