ABSTRACT
The chapter argued that anatomico-symptomatic correlation was and has been a difficult activity in three ways: it was difficult in practice to carry out in the eighteenth century (and earlier); it was hard to conceptualize at the time; and it has proved elusive historiographically, for the tendency has been to transmute it into mere ‘pathological anatomy’ – as the people see in the discourses of both Porter and Foucault. Nevertheless there is a very real tension between ‘at once’ and ‘alone’, a tension which corresponds to the absence and presence respectively of anatomico-symptomatic correlation. The very phenomenon which the people observed in both Porter and Foucault – the tendency for anatomico-symptomatic correlation to slip out of focus and to be replaced by the mere performance of the post-mortem – appears within the discourse of Bichat himself.
