ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Michel Foucault’s work on medicine. It brings some medical history into connection with literature by offering a brief reading of three canonical, nineteenth-century, realist novels. The space is discursive in that the medical gaze is organized in terms of how relations between doctors and patients were conceived. But in history the real and discursive do not belong to two disconnected orders: more specifically, the medical gaze is preconditioned by what Foucault calls, in a phrase which will remain important to him, its “concrete a-priori.” The free medical gaze was considered to be obstructed by the unreformed institutions – the old universities and hospitals in which old lore and fevers dominated. Foucault regards the emergence of Bichat’s medicine as a profound occasion for Western culture. The absorption of death into life means that each patient will for the first time become an individual for medicine.
