The Birth Of The Clinic (Routledge Classics S.)

In this text, Michel Foucault calls us to look critically at specific historical events in order to uncover new layers of significance. In doing so, he challenges our assumptions not only about history, but also about the nature of language and reason, even of truth. By analysing the methods of observation that underpinned the origins of modern medical techniques, Foucault is able to identify that opening up of the concrete individual, for the first time in Western history, to the language of rationality, that major event in the relationship of man to himself and of language to things.