What did a doctor see, in the middle of the 18th century, when he observed the presence of the disease in the patient's body? Undoubtedly, his methods and his speech still owe much to myth, belief and imagination. At the end of that century, however, medicine underwent a radical change: the source of medical truth becomes the attentive eye, careful perception that records spots, irregularities, hardness, color, adhesions. This empirical surveillance, which was born with the Enlightenment, becomes the new principle that governs the relationship with the patient and that is presented as a guarantee of completeness and precision.

The birth of the clinic, published in France in 1963, is a revealing essay about medical observation and its methods for a brief but fruitful period in which, in clinical practice, the gaze became a criterion of truth and rationality. Until that time, the medical knowledge spoke a language without perceptual support. “The new spirit,” Michel Foucault explains, “is nothing more than a syntactic reorganization of the disease, in which the limits of the visible and the invisible follow a new stroke.” Disease and even death, formerly opaque, are now offered to the clarity of the gaze.

The book also addresses two central issues in the formation of the clinic as a science: the reorganization of the hospital environment and the acquisition, by the patient, of a status of their own in society. It is thus a valuable effort to elucidate not only the emergence of medicine as science, but also that of a new experience of disease.