![]() The medical gaze is a novel way of seeing that involves the physician in a “double system of observation” - one that discovers the disease process and “circumscribes its natural truth.” Under the medical gaze, a person’s “constitution” - the structural body and its functional idiosyncrasies - is a conglomeration that can be traversed by a physician aware of an array of telling signs. One of the greatest historians and philosophers of science, Michel Foucault coined an innovative idea to describe this new kind of medicine in his seminal work The Birth of the Clinic: the medical gaze. These modern empirical observations revealed how little the physicians of the time knew, and gradually eroded the ancient perception of the doctor-as-sage. For example, rather than dwell on fanciful cosmic explanations for fever, these new, modern physicians were more inclined to carefully inspect the patient and their surroundings for immediate and discernible causes of afflictions. ![]() Instead, they were turning increasingly towards the Enlightenment idea of empiricism - the practice of relying on the observation of physical phenomena to develop general principles of how the human body worked. Clinics were formed for the general populace, and forever changed medical science.Īround the same time, physicians were also starting to distance themselves from superstitious, anecdotal descriptions of what ailed their patients. Through post-Revolutionary health reforms, physicians were subjected to the radical dream of an open practice and uninhibited science. At the beginning of the 19th century, physicians began taking a greater responsibility for the health of their whole community. Before the French Revolution, physicians were the personal aides to particular members of the aristocracy. The French Revolution demanded a re-examination of our basic human rights, and invited insight into the causes and effects of our health. ![]() We take for granted a traditional paradigm of questioning, asking: “What brings you into clinic today?” and “Where does it hurt?” What we do not realize is that this conditioning is the result of a great epistemological leap taken after the French Revolution, which shaped the face of modern-day medicine. As students of medicine, we become familiar with the proper course of questioning that leads us to identify a patient’s problem. ![]()
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