Thursday 23 May 2024

Michel Foucault's "The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century"


18th Century Development of Private, "Liberal" Medicine and Medical Politics

• The 18th century saw the development of private, "liberal" medicine and a medical politics supported by power structures.
• Western medicine originated as a collective practice with magico-religious institutions and gradually dismantled through the organization of private clienteles.
• The center of initiative, organization, and control for this politics was not only in the apparatuses of the state but also in various health policies and methods for taking charge of medical problems.
• Health and sickness were problematized through the initiatives of multiple social instances, with the state playing various different roles.
• The eighteenth-century problematization of noso-politics correlates not with a uniform trend of state intervention in the practice of medicine but with the empergence at various sites in the social body of health and disease as problems requiring some form of collective control measures.
• The focus of noso-politics in French and European society was on the displacement of health problems relative to assistance problems.
• The eighteenth century saw the progressive dislocation of these mixed and polyvalent procedures of assistance due to a general reexamination of modes of investment and capitalization.
• The term "police" was used to ensure order, the proper channeled growth of wealth, and the conditions of preservation of health.
• The health and physical well-being of populations became a political objective that the "police" of the social body must ensure alongside those of economic regulation and the needs of order.
• The shift from the narrow context of charitable aid to the more general form of a "medical police" was made due to the demographic upswing in Western Europe.
• The family became the most constant agent of medicalization, with the first wave of this offensive bearing on care of children, especially babies.

18th Century Medical Politics and Family Organization

• The family's role in health politics in the 19th century is crucial, linking general health objectives to individual desire for care.
• The family's rights and duties, the market where supply and demand for medical care meet, and authoritarian interventions of power are key features of the 18th century's medical politics.
• The privilege of hygiene and the function of medicine as an instance of social control are essential aspects of the politics of health in the 19th century.
• Medicine, as a general technique of health, assumes an increasingly important place in the administrative system and machinery of power.
• Doctors gain a footing within various instances of social power, acting as a point of support and sometimes a point of departure for great medical inquiries into the health of populations.

Challenges Faced by Hospital Institutions

• The emergence of "population" with biomedical variables of longevity and health, the organization of the narrowly parental family as a relay in medicalization, and the interlacing of medical and administrative instances in organizing collective hygiene led to the hospital appearing as an obsolete structure.
• Three principal mechanisms were proposed to replace the hospital: the organization of a domestic form of "hospitalization," the third method of dispensaries aimed to retain the technical advantages of hospitalization without its medical and economic drawbacks.

Spatial Adaptation of Hospitals

• The spatial adaptation of hospitals was a significant issue, with debates and conflicts over whether to build large or smaller ones.
• The hospital's purpose was to become a functional element in urban spaces, subject to measurement and control.

Specializing Hospitals

• Hospitals emerged in the 18th century, serving as a support structure for permanent settlement of the population by medical personnel.
• The hospital's role as a therapeutic instrument for patients and a place of accumulation and development of knowledge led to the reorganization of medical studies.

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