Wednesday, July 4, 2007

The Birth of the Clinic--Chapter 1

While I read The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilization in May, I never properly "blogged" about them in the hustle-and-bustle of Upward Bound. So, here goes:

"Chapter 1: Spaces and Classes"

"Before it is removed from the density of the body, disease is given an organization, hierarchized into families, genera, and species" (BC 4).

"Disease is perceived fundamentally in a space of projection without depth, of coincidence without development. There is only one plane and one moment" (BC 6).

"The picture resemble things, but they also resemble one another. The distance that separates one disease from another can be measured only be the degree of their resemblance, w/out reference to the logico-temporal divergence of genealogy" (BC 6).

"For classificatory medicine, presence in an organ is never absolutely necessary to define a disease: this disease may travel from on point of localization to another, reach other bodily surfaces, while retaining identical in nature" (BC 10).

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