The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

Throughout the book, I often turn to literature or film – works that bear direct significance to the clinics I chronicle – to illustrate the stakes of healthcare models on display. This is a short passage from my chapter on La Borde, introduced by a description of the film Every Little Thing:

In the opening scene of Nicolas Philibert’s documenta­ry film Every Little Thing (1996), a middle-aged woman with short brown hair paces around a forested estate. She wears baggy pink shorts and a khaki green vest. Shaded by trees, she bends her arms, her palms turned upward to the sky, like a Christian orant. Nothing equals my sorrow, she hums in a high-pitched voice, I am succumbing to my pain. In the next shot, a man wanders through an endless park. His steps are hesitant, uneven, as though he is per­petually forgetting and relearning how to walk. In the background appears the off-white façade of the nine­teenth-century château that, since 1953, has been home to the experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde, in Cour-Cheverny, 125 miles south of Paris. All around it, bodies move about quietly, like planets orbiting a sun.

Made in the summer of 1995, Every Little Thing documents the making of La Borde’s annual theatre performance. That year, it was Operetta: the 1964 satiri­cal play by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Set in the first half of the twentieth century – though deliberately blending temporal references – the play follows a cast of deluded aristocrats struggling to retain their sense of identity. In the wake of social upheaval, they fear that the normalization of nudity might expose their commonness and strip them of privilege. The play serves as a critique of social conventions – an absurdist take on the perfor­mance of status….