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

While I see this book as, first and foremost, a work of literary nonfiction, it also contributes to the fields of medical humanities, comparative literature, and gender and sexuality studies. The title, The Death of the Clinic, of course, nods to Michel Foucault’s 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic, in which he argued that, at the end of the eighteenth century, modern medicine shifted from abstract conceptualizations of disease to empirical modes of observation through what he calls the “medical gaze.” Taking up Paul B. Preciado’s call “to put Foucault on the crip-queer diet and write The Death of the Clinic” (2020), I wanted to trace a history of social and community-led medicine in the twentieth century, one that is patient-centred, queer, personal, anecdotal – all of the human qualities that modern medicine has strove to exclude in the name of objective empiricism. I was influenced by the feminist thinker Jane Gallop’s concept of “anecdotal theory” (2002) and the medical philosopher Kirsti Malterud’s call for an art of medicine “defined as the successful interrelationship between the biomedical and the humanistic perspectives in clinical practice” (1995).

Ongoing thread. More from Benoît Loiseau to follow.