The Birth of the Clinic

The living night is dissipated in the brightness of death.

the great break in the history of Western medicine dates precisely from the moment clinical experience became the anatomo-clinical gaze.

is at death that disease and life speak their truth

The irreducibility of the living to the mechanical or chemical is secondary only in relation to the fundamental link between life and death. Vitalism appears against the background of this ‘mortalism’.

that to which life is opposed and to which it is exposed; that in relation to which it is living opposition, and therefore life; that in relation to which it is analytically exposed, and therefore true

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.

Death is the great analyst that shows the connexions by unfolding them, and bursts open the wonders of genesis in the rigour of decomposition

The privilege of its intemporality, which is no doubt as old as the consciousness of its imminence, is turned for the first time into a technical instrument that provides a grasp on the truth of life and the nature of its illness.

The time of death may slide along the entire length of the morbid evolution; and as this death loses its opaque character, it becomes, paradoxically, and by virtue of its effect of temporal interruption, the instrument by which the duration of the disease can be integrated with the immobile space of a dissected body.

The successive envelopes of life are detached naturally, enunciating their autonomy and truth in the very thing they deny.