"Life, disease, and death now form a technical and conceptual trinity. The continuity of the age-old beliefs that placed the threat of disease in life and of the approaching presence of death in disease is broken; in its place is articulated a triangular figure the summit of which is defined by death. It is from the height of death that one can see and analyse organic dependences and pathological sequences.Instead of being what it had so long been, the night in which life disappeared, in which even the disease becomes blurred, it is now endowed with that great power of elucidation that dominates and reveals both the space of the organism and the time of the disease.The privilege of its intemporality, which is no doubt as old as the consciousness of its imminence, is turned for the first time into atechnical instrument that provides a grasp on the truth of life and the nature of its illness. Death is the great analyst that shows the connexions by unfolding them, and bursts open the wonders of genesis in the rigour of decomposition: and the word decomposition must be allowed to stagger under the weight of its meaning.Analysis, the philosophy of elements and their laws, meets its death in what it had vainly sought in mathematics, chemistry, and even language: an unsupersedable model, prescribed by nature; it is on this great example that the medical gaze will now rest. It is no longer that of a living eye, but the gaze of an eye that has seen death—a great white eye that unties the knot of life.."
"...But the perception of death in life does not have the same function in the nineteenth century as at the Renaissance. Then it carried with it reductive significations: differences of fate, fortune,conditions were effaced by its universal gesture; it drew each irrevocably to all; the dances of skeletons depicted, on the underside of life, a sort of egalitarian saturnalia; death unfailingly compensated for fortune. Now, on the contrary, it is constitutive of singularity; it is in that perception of death that the individual finds himself,escaping from a monotonous, average life; in the slow, half-subterranean, but already visible approach of death, the dull,common life becomes an individuality at last; a black border isolates it and gives it the style of its own truth. Hence the importance of the Morbid. The macabre implied a homogeneous perception of death, once its threshold had been crossed. The morbid authorizes a subtle perception of the way in which life finds in death its most differentiated figure. The morbid is the rarefied form of life,exhausted, working itself into the void of death; but also in another sense, that in death it takes on its peculiar volume, irreducible to conformities and customs, to received necessities; a singular volume defined by its absolute rarity. The privilege of the consumptive: in earlier times, one contracted leprosy against a background of great waves of collective punishment; in the nineteenth century, a man, in becoming tubercular, in the fever that hastens things and betrays them, fulfills his incommunicable secret. That is why chest diseases are of exactly the same nature as diseases of love: they are the Passion, a life to which death gives a face that cannot be exchanged.Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret..."
" ...This structure, in which space, language, and death are articulated—what is known, in fact, as the anatomo-clinical method—constitutes the historical condition of a medicine that is given and accepted as positive.Positive here should be taken in the strong sense. Disease breaks away from the metaphysic of evil, to which it had been related for centuries;and it finds in the visibility of death the full form in which its content appears in positive terms. Conceived in relation to nature, disease wasthe non-assignable negative of which the causes, forms, and manifestations were offered only indirectly and against an ever-recedingbackground; seen in relation to death, disease becomes exhaustively legible, open without remainder to the sovereign dissection of language and of the gaze. It is when death became the concrete a priori of medical experience that death could detach itself from counter-nature and become embodied in the living bodies of individuals..."
"... this positive medicine marked, at the empirical level, the beginning of that fundamental relation that binds modern man to his original finitude. Hence the fundamental place of medicine in the over-all architecture of the human sciences: it is closer than any of them to the anthropological structure that sustains them all. Hence, too, its prestige in the concrete forms of existence:health replaces salvation, said Guardia. This is because medicine offers modern man the obstinate, yet reassuring face of his finitude;in it, death is endlessly repeated, but it is also exorcized; and although it ceaselessly reminds man of the limit that he bears within him, it also speaks to him of that technical world that is the armed,positive, full form of his finitude. At that point in time, medical gestures, words, gazes took on a philosophical density that had formerly belonged only to mathematical thought. The importance ofBichat, Jackson, and Freud in European culture does not prove that they were philosophers as well as doctors, but that, in this culture,medical thought is fully engaged in the philosophical status of man..."
M. Foucault. Naissance de la Clinique. Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. trans., The Birth of the Clinic. Routledge, 1973.