4 - The Construction of the Hospital Patient in Early Modern France

Summary

INTRODUCTION: CONFINEMENT, MEDICINE, AND HOSPITALS

The point of intersection between the history of confinement and the history of medicine constitutes a terrain on which Michel Foucault has made a massive contribution. Foucault's work on confinement is better known than his medical scholarship. Symptomatically, his Birth of the Clinic is the most neglected of his works by his exegetists, while the most medically orientated chapters of his Histoire de lafolie have never been translated into English and remain surprisingly little known. Among historians of medicine, however, his work has lent support to the more general scholarly move away from the kind of “Whig” or “presentist” perspective which has dominated the field for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which made of the history of medicine a ritual celebration of the ever onward and upward ascent of medical science, whose way stations are great men of science and great medical discoveries. Foucault's Histoire de lafolie is so antitriumphalist, indeed, that it has even attracted criticism for merely inverting the traditional schema, so that the history of medicine becomes a depressing and punitive dimension of an overarching historical process of the will to power and knowledge. Yet even his critics acknowledge that after Foucault the history of medicine can never be the same again.