The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

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If this is a structuralist account we can expect some talk about signs, signifiers and the signified. And, being medicine, some talk of symptoms also seems inevitable. But what is the difference between a sign and a symptom? The problem is that we have a fairly limited vocabulary of signs – ‘my stomach hurts, I’ve a sore head, it’s a kind of stabbing pain here” – and putting these signs together so as they add up to symptoms defining a disease can be anything but obvious. Particularly given a disease is generally temporal in nature and therefore changes over time. Interestingly, I found out more about the contributions of Bichat, Morgagni, Dupuytren and so on, names that nowadays only depict some syndromes, diseases or anatomical parts (Bichat's Bullae, Morgagni tubercles, Dupuytren contracture). In many ways this book is a structuralist analysis of the kinds of discourses that go on in medicine. There is some incredibly interesting stuff at the start where the disadvantages of putting people into hospitals prior to the French Revolution is discussed by doctors at the time because they understood illness as something needing to be explained in relation to the patient’s entire life as lived and in the hospital a person stops being a person and becomes merely an example of an illness. This shifting relationship between what one is and what one becomes due to where one is, how one is being observed, is really interesting and still relevant today. I think it is also interesting in relation to more than just medicine – also education, workplaces, the courts and so on. Unless you need to be in a specific position to allow for close monitoring of you and your baby, consider these ways to promote comfort during active labor: Foucault's thesis about the birth of the clinic (teaching hospital) contradicts the histories of medicine that present the late 18th century as the beginning of a new empirical system "based on the rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible" material reality. [4] The birth of modern medicine was not a common-sense move towards seeing what already existed, but actually was a paradigm shift in the intellectual structures for the production of knowledge, which made clinical medicine a new way of thinking about the body and illness, disease and medicine:

Modern medicine begins for Foucault around the time of the French Revolution, at a time when the gaze newly encompasses other factors. Time and space now mattered. Foucault does not make it easy to understand his ideas. Perhaps the translation obscures his ideas to a degree, but some scholars have suggested that Foucault is purposely abstruse and prolix (to use one of his own favorite words). The major thrust of this book is also obscured by some French history and Franco-centrism that while interesting does not clarify. To appreciate The Birth of the Clinic requires more than one careful reading and the aid of Foucaultian scholars who have worked through his ideas. Done this way, however, Foucault rewards the reader interested in how medical knowledge and the clinic came to be. Source: Don't be surprised if your initial excitement wanes as labor progresses and your discomfort intensifies. Ask for pain medication or anesthesia if you want it. Your health care team will partner with you to make the best choice for you and your baby. Remember, you're the only one who can judge your need for pain relief. Pathological anatomy, the science generating knowledge about the visible alterations on organs and tissues diseases cause, marked an important advance for the clinic upon “the day it was admitted that lesions explained symptoms” (p. 127). From then on, and accelerated by investigations using exhumed corpses, pathological anatomy became “an objective, real, and at last unquestionable foundation for the description of diseases” (p. 129). A member of your health care team may massage your abdomen. This may help the uterus contract to decrease bleeding.The Birth Company in Alderley Edge, Cheshire was last inspected by the Care Quality Commission in April 2021. The CQC rated The Birth Company as Good for being a caring and responsive service. St. Godard, E. E. (2005). "A better Reading". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 173 (9): 1072–1073. doi: 10.1503/cmaj.051067. PMC 1266341.

Book Genre: Anthropology, Health, History, Medical, Medicine, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Sociology, Theory After you deliver the placenta, your uterus will continue to contract to help it return to its normal size.

This medical experience is therefore akin even to a lyrical experience that his language sought, from Hölderlin to Rilke. This experience, which began in the eighteenth century, and from which we have not yet escaped, is bound up with a return to the forms of finitude, of which death is no doubt the most menacing, but also the fullest. Hölderlin’s Empedocles, reaching, by voluntary steps, the very edge of Etna, is the death of the last mediator between mortals and Olympus, the end of the infinite on earth, the flame returning to its native fire, leaving as its sole remaining trace that which had precisely to be abolished by his death: the beautiful, enclosed form of individuality; after Empedocles, the world is placed under the sign of finitude, in that irreconcilable, intermediate state in which reigns the Law, the harsh law of limit; the destiny of individuality will be to appear always in the objectivity that manifests and conceals it, that denies it and yet forms its basis: ‘here, too, the subjective and the objective exchange faces.’ Satin AJ. Labor: Diagnosis and management of the latent phase. https://www.uptodate.com/contents/search. Accessed Oct. 28, 2021.

the development of clinical medicine, of pathology (this part is quite tenuous to read especially if you are a doctor and know the actual state of the arts. because those whole "ancient" theories about tissues and diseases are nowadays outdated, you can read them and think of them as medical dystopies (HAHAHA). Nevertheless, the reasons for inventing the stethoscope are quite funny (as the doctor was not allowed to put his ear on the woman's chest) Apart from Foucault’s hidden unjustified arguments, I have problems with the way he describes the phenomena – in this case, medical knowledge. He uses a language that is, at times, heavily ambiguous and is more literature than philosophy:

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Wat een prachtig boek, zoveel wijsheid! Het vergt echt een boel inspanning om het te begrijpen maar het is het meer dan waard. Foucault gebruikt het halve boek om de tegenstelling te schetsen tussen hoe de geneeskunde was en hoe de geneeskunde nu is. Dat is nog best een lastig onderscheid, maar dat het zo moeilijk te begrijpen is, toont ook hoe normaal de huidige manier van denken is. Stap voor stap ontleedt en reconstrueert Foucault de klinische blik, de vanzelfsprekendheid waarmee je als arts je patiënt tegemoet treedt. Dat is ontzettend waardevol, want de blinde vlekken worden zo ook duidelijk. En kritische reflectie op het hoe en waarom kan ook nooit kwaad. Dit boek is een absolute aanrader voor iedereen die zich wel eens afvraagt waarom we de dingen in de kliniek op een bepaalde manier doen. If you're having an uncomplicated pregnancy, you may spend most of your early labor at home until your contractions start to increase in frequency and intensity. Your health care provider will instruct you on when to leave for the hospital or birthing center. If your water breaks or you experience significant vaginal bleeding, call your health care provider right away. Active labor

At some point, you might be asked to push more gently — or not at all. Slowing down gives your vaginal tissues time to stretch rather than tear. To stay motivated, you might ask if you could feel the baby's head between your legs or see it in a mirror.

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Modern medicine has fixed its own date of birth as being in the last years of the eighteenth century. Reflecting on its situation, it identifies the origin of its positivity with a return—over and above all theory—to the modest but effecting level of the perceived. In fact, this supposed empiricism is not based on a rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible, nor on the predetermined rejection of systems and all their chimeras, but on a reorganization of that manifest and secret space that opened up when a millennial gaze paused over men’s sufferings. Nonetheless the rejuvenation of medical perception, the way colours and things came to life under the illuminating gaze of the first clinicians is no mere myth. Naissance de la clinique" est sans doute la moins lue et la moins commentée de toutes les monographies foucaldiennes. Publiée pour la première fois en 1963, cette "archéologie du regard médical" n'a jamais suscité le même intérêt que des ouvrages désormais classiques comme "Les Mots et les choses" (1966) ou "Surveiller et punir" (1975). We must place ourselves, and remain once and for all, at the level of the fundamental spatialization and verbalization of the pathological, where the loquacious gaze with which the doctor observes the poisonous heart of things is born and communes with itself” (xii-xiii).