The Role of clinical medicine on the constitution of science of man: Birth of the clinic rereading

Monajemi, Alireza

doi:10.30465/ps.2019.4267

The Role of clinical medicine on the constitution of science of man: Birth of the clinic rereading

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Alireza Monajemi

Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy of Science and Technology, Humanities Research Institute

https://doi.org/10.30465/ps.2019.4267

Abstract

In “Birth of the Clinic” Foucault's shows that it was not the natural sciences but the clinical medicine that laid the foundation for the humanities. At the end of the book The Birth of the Clinic, he argues that the humanities are based on modern clinical medicine. The importance of medical science in the founding of the humanities, he says, is not purely methodological because human existence is defined or perceived as the object of positive science. Of course, Foucault does not make more of his claim and does not expand it. In this article I will try to show how this claim can be defended on the basis of his formulation of clinical medicine, and what implications it will have for the humanities.
In order to understand comprehensively the thesis medicine should be framed based on the views of medical philosophers. Without these arrangements, it would be difficult to understand Foucault's claim. It seems that not only he has suspended implicitly or neglected many of philosophical issues of medicine in the Birth of the Clinic, but also his interpreters were unfamiliar with the tradition of medical philosophy. First, I'm trying to show that medicine is a different mode of thinking than the natural sciences, if that were not the case, Foucault's claim would be so trivial: human being has been transformed to the object by medicine, and it was then that the founding of the human sciences was inspired by the natural sciences, which is a mistaken belief. This section will be based on the views of Ludwig Falk on the serious differences between medical thinking and the natural sciences. I describe the structure of clinical medicine and its various disciplines and their interaction. In this is based on Kazem Sadeghzadeh ideas. In the next section, I will attempt to show how Foucault has formulated modern clinical medicine and its evolution in the form of three-level spatialization. In the final chapter, I will show how Foucault's formulation of clinical medicine can form the basis of the humanities. Thus this article appears to be an attempt to link the philosophy of medicine and the philosophy of the humanities through a new reading of the Birth of a Clinic

Keywords

Foucault

Clinical medicine

Philosophy of medicine

philosophy of social sciences

The birth of clinic

Spatialization

بنتون، ت و کرایب، ی. (1384). فلسفۀ علوم اجتماعی: بنیادهای فلسفی تفکر اجتماعی، مترجم: شهناز مسمی‌پرست. محمود متحد، تهران: آگه.

فلک ل. (1370). نکاتی درباره برخی از مشخصات شیوه تفکر پزشکی، ترجمه: اعتماد ش، مجله رهیافت، 1(2)، ص 76-80.

فوکو، م. (1378). مراقبت و تنبیه: تولد زندان، مترجم: نیکو سرخوش و افشین جهان‌دیده، تهران: نشر نی.

فوکو، م. (1385). پیدایش کلینیک؛ دیرینه‌شناسی ادراک پزشکی، مترجم: یحیی امامی، تهران: انتشارات نقش و نگار.

فوکو، م. (1390). تولد پزشکی بالینی، مترجم: فاطمه ولیانی، تهران: نشر ماهی.

منجمی، ع. (1396). درنگی بر مفهوم علوم انسانی آلمانی (Geiteswissenschaft) مجله علمی پژوهشی روش‌شناسی علوم انسانی، دوره 23، شماره 91، ص 29-48.

منجمی، ع. (1390). پزشکی به‌مثابه پارادایم؟ مجله علمی پژوهشی فلسفه علم، سال سوم، شماره دوم، ص 123-136.

مقدم‌حیدری، غ. (1396). بررسی مشاهدۀ بازتابی و مشاهدۀ نافذ در تاریخ جنون، مجلۀ تاریخ پزشکی، دوره 9، شماره 33، ص 48-61.

Anderson, R. L. (2003). The debate over the Geisteswissenschaften in German philosophy in ed, Baldwin, T. (2003) The Cambridge history of philosophy 1870-1945, Cambridge University press.

Bishop, J. P. (2009). Foucauldian diagnostics: Space, time, and the metaphysics of medicine, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, p 1 – 22.

Chappey, J. L. (2006). De la science de l’homme aux sciences humaines: enjeux politiques d’une configuration de savoir (1770-1808), Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 2006, 15, 43-68.

Canguilhem, G. (1989). The Normal and the Pathological, tr. C. R. Fawcett, New York, Zone, 1989 [main section dating from 1943].

Foucault, M. (1963). Nassance de la Clinique, Paris: Quadrige/Puf.

Hoyrup, J. (2000). Human Science: Humanities through history and Philosophy, New York: State University of New York.

Gadamer, H. G. (1989). Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. by J. Weinsheimer and D.G.Marshall, New York: Crossroad.

Grbin, M. (2015). “Foucault and space” Socioloski Pregled, 49(3): 305–312.

Kiasma. G. K. (1990). Frames of refrence and the growth of medical knowledge: L. Fleck and M. Foucault in ten Have H.A M. J (Ed), The growth of medical knowledge, Dordrecht: Kluwer academic publisher, pp 41-62.

Munson, R. (1981). Why medicine cannot be a science. The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 6:183–208.

Osborne, T. (1998). On anti-medicine and clinical reason, in Jones, C & Porter, R (Eds), Reassesing Foucault: Power, medicine and the body, London: Routledge, pp 24-48.

Rouse, J. (1993). Foucault and the Natural Sciences. Division I Faculty Publications. Paper 33. http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div1facpubs/33.

Sadegh-Zadeh, K. (2015). Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine, Dordrecht: Springer.

Sholl, J. & De Block, A. (2015). Towards a critique normalization: Canguilhem and Boorse, in Meacham, D.)Ed), Medicine and society, new perspectives in continental philosophy, Netherlands: Springer, pp 141-158.

Wieland, W. (2002). The character and mission of the practical sciences, as exemplified by medicine, Poiesis and Praxis, 1:123-134.