Feb. 2026 Meeting Notes: The Birth of the Clinic by Foucault | Literature, Medicine, and Culture Colloquium

Our February 2026 LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 5:30pm strictly over Zoom.

We discussed Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963; trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith, 1973). Specifically, we asked everyone to focus on the following:

Preface (pp. ix-xix)
Chapter 1: “Spaces and Classes” (pp. 3-21)
Suggested optional reading: Chapter 6: “Signs and Cases” (pp. 88-106)

If you missed the meeting, you can still access the texts on the Readings page of this site!

You can also access the recording of our meeting here.

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Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. Routledge, 2003. Translation first published in 1973. Originally published as Naissance de la Clinique by Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.

Meeting Notes (courtesy of LMCC Co-Director Mindy Buchanan-King):

Paul: Productive connections between last month’s reading and this month’s reading. Thinking about the way we’re historizing medicine: Really intrigued about Ch. 6—thoughts?
Desire: This was part of her reading list. Last month’s reading resonated with Foucault’s theory, and thinking about Paul Starr’s work on professionalization of the medical field. How does normal exist beyond the clinic? Thinking about the different iterations of the clinic.
Paul: Starr jumped out as well, thinking about cultural authority. We have the new definition of professional authority. There’s a few times when that comes up, the new rubrics of making things legible.
Desire: Thinking about the language around visibility and going from the direction of the patient narrative versus the prescriptive approach. Thinking about social and cultural politics that we talk about.
Paul: It’s not what is happening, but where does it hurt? The doctor becomes the reader and authority.
Camille: Having to reread Foucault for exams, especially genealogy of ethics. He’s accessible in his interviews with Paul Rabinow. It’s interesting to think about discourse and the necessity for him to write like he does, versus how he’s speaking. It is a grind to get through.
Bri: Second time reading it, maybe it’s something to come back to periodically. Think back to the Language of Trauma.
Desire: Had to read The Order of Things and introducing the episteme and how that intersects with his other studies.
Paul: Reading the body especially resonates with much of our readings, and a good return to foundation.
Desire: Our orientation to what we think disease is has changed. What does it look like for disease to manifest in a different form? If a disease could stand by the body, how does that exist outside of the body? Would be interesting to see disease stand autonomously outside of the body.
Paul: This idea about disease as negating the rest of the person—now we see the deviation, defining things by difference. In the first chapter, Foucault talks about keywords that could be used in science writing. P. 97: The individual is not a sick person, but a pathological “fact”—the plurality of observations.
Desire: Even throwing out the word “difference”—how much Foucault makes you think about Derrida and Lacan and thinking about that in the context of disease. It does show trajectories of thought and how networks of thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s that lays the foundation for the conversations we are having.
Paul: This sense of discourse on difference and the clinical gaze, and how the Birth of the Clinic is in one sense dehumanizing, which reduces the human to the medical text
Desire: It’s like an amalgamation of humanizing (the disease) and dehumanizing (the person)
Camille: Think it’s interesting to contrast this with the Body Multiple because Foucault’s right about epistemology and thinking through the conditions of possibility of how we’re thinking. Thinking about the clinic as this site where disease is read in a very specific way—shifting to ontology, where we think about disease as being outside the body. How disease is enacted in the pathology lab—getting at that spatial element.
Desire: Around p. 111, talking about the formation of the clinical—specifically talking about the “immediacy of the symptom.” What does Foucault mean by totalization?
Paul: The idea of spontaneity and system of relations; the way symptoms and their relations constitute disease and the role of time—the disease is always being rewritten to infinity. We’re constantly constituting disease. It’s not necessarily trial and error, but always continually constituting it in each case. There is something interesting happening with time.
Desire: That’s true about the time on the body and the time spent outside of the clinic. This is also true of genealogical or archaeological study—that methodology of the tracing is the most prominent that comes out of this.
Camille: The primacy of the visual on medical student education—on p. 108, re: the clinical gaze to hear and to see. Establishes the power of the visual, and mixing up of the senses.
Bri: The hospital and teaching domains are linked; the big utility of the visuality is not just in what can be done for the patient, but how to transfer that to the student. The clinic is a didactic place. That’s come up in thinking about clinic as providing care but always at the same time gleaning knowledge for the purpose of transferring that knowledge.
Camille: That’s a good point. When he talks about the historical context and the hospital having to be reenvisioned as a site of professionalized care. A lot of the older Foucault of the power over the patient, he tends to change his mind. He later states that freedom always exists, even in the capacity to take one’s own life. There is not a complete domination. People criticize him for biopolitics, and he argues that that is room for agency.
Bri: To that point, the patient perspective isn’t really present. And that’s okay.
Paul: That raises an interesting point about how much you can do in a single work. In going back to that passing of knowledge, the clinical is both teaching and hospital. It is a didactic space. There is something interesting about the body opening up.
Bri: Started reading the wrong chapter, but Ch. 8 (“Open Up a Few Corpses”) might be good for Paul’s research.
Paul: It feels intuitive and maybe ubiquitous, but the supremacy of the visual is a literal way to think about prioritizing the visual. Maybe it’s cultural, but that also applies to reading texts and bodies. Even hearing language versus creating language, the choice of a passive voice is interesting.
Camille: Interesting the contrast between 18^th century and before and the 19^th Looking at p. 8, there are many arguments about how pain was not treated or valued. Historically, the argument was that there wasn’t much to deal with pain (anesthetics). You didn’t want to give the cure or the palliative too early, then you wouldn’t get the true essence of the pain.
Paul: That was an interesting moment but thinking about how we need to let all of the signs become interpretable.
Camille: At least with pain, historically, pain relief was not much of a thing in the clinic.
Mindy: Point to the connection of pain obscured in polio, which pain Claire Seiler’s research is trying to make conscious
Paul: The medical narrative of polio in mainstream culture, is the image not of pain, but of someone in a wheelchair. We’re not really reading the disease clearly if we’re obscuring the pain.
Bri: Thoughts on how pain complicates the disease: We’re told sometimes not to take Tylenol because it would impede the healing process.
Camille: There had to be a shift in mentality of pain as a disease itself; there’s a difference between seeing at a symptom versus a disease.
Paul: We always come back to this, no matter what period we’re studying, this idea of classification. The word “deviant” stuck out this time in reading, and the process of subtracting everything and finding the deviant. There’s even a sense of a “normal case” and the distinctions coming out of the professionalization of medicine.
Bri: “The Political Consciousness” chapter of Birth discusses the “model man”: The medical gaze is always referring back to a textbook idea of what a healthy person is, or what a totally unremarkable person is. This work is so much about building and interacting with a model form of human health. The word “botanical model” is used, to describe allowing the disease to fully “bloom” during the 18^th
Camille: Normal versus the pathological, and the idea of defining this normal and the shift to thinking about quantitative measures and how we become defined by these population norms.
Paul: Always drawn to the dehumanizing nature of these norms. The botanical model stood out as well—there’s something interesting to unpack there, about being taxonomists and categorizing.

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Note: The featured image for this post is from the cover image of a 1994 printing of Foucault’s monograph.