The Birth of the Clinic and the Sources of Archaeological History

Abstract

The year 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of a classic of the historiography of sciences, Michel Foucault’s The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical gaze. In different parts of the world, events were organized to reflect on this important work. The article argues that if one cannot draw a direct line linking the work of the leading historians-philosophers of the twentieth-century sciences in France to Michel Foucault’s archaeological study of the clinic, we must recognize that the author of The Birth of the Clinic has taken up from these historians-philosophers the methodological and conceptual tools that made it possible to study the history of science and knowledge in a new way.

Keywords

• Historiography of Medicine
• French epistemology
• Michel Foucault
• Gaston Bachelard
• Alexandre Koyré
• Georges Canguilhem