Details

ISBN-10: 0679753346
ISBN-13: 9780679753346
Publisher: Vintage
Publish Date: 03/29/1994
Dimensions: 8.00" L, 5.21" W, 0.66" H

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

Paperback

Price: $16.95

Overview

In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.

In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitude–in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.

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Reviews
Learned [and] rewarding...The Birth of the Clinic continues [Foucault's] brilliant history, not of ideas as such, but of the of perception." – The New York Times Book Review


"The Birth of the Clinic attempts a minor revolution in medical-history writing.... Foucault's research is overwhelming and affords the reader considerable entertainment as well as insight."

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Details

ISBN-10: 0679753346
ISBN-13: 9780679753346
Publisher: Vintage
Publish Date: 03/29/1994
Dimensions: 8.00" L, 5.21" W, 0.66" H
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