For this reason, he was criticized for practicing historical epistemology rather than narrating historical reality.[8] Foucault rejected the notion of objective historical reality. Instead, he took a post-structuralist approach that treated history as a structure of power and knowledge that needed to be interpreted on the level of language. Foucault practiced a kind of history of ideas, which some have described as a shift toward history of meaning, as opposed to the more traditional intellectual history.[9].
The Birth of the Clinic: Summary.
In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault attempted to disentangle the "conditions of possibility " for a modern medical perception. He deciphered medical discourse amid a collection of late 18th century scientific, political and philosophical texts, locating changes in ways of thinking about death and disease.[10] The preface set out the historical methodology of investigating the "conditions of possibility " made evident through language and linguistic interpretation. His presentist aim, as he noted in the conclusion, sought to historicize "the positive reformulation of death: " the shift from the notion of treating the disease to the mission of sustaining the patient's health.[11].
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 establish the 18th century foundation of medical knowledge, a method of reading disease according to a "nosological " structure. Foucault described this way of practicing medicine using a spatial metaphor of depth and dimensionality. The doctor subtracted the disease from the patient by creating a two-dimensional mental picture:.
Classificatory thought gives itself an essential space, which it proceeds to efface at each moment. Disease exists only in that space, since that space constitutes it as nature; and yet it always appears rather out of phase in relation to that space, because it is manifested in a real patient, beneath the observing eye of a forearmed doctor.
