The Birth of the Clinic

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical, 1963), by Michel Foucault, presents the development of la clinique, the teaching hospital, as a medical institution, identifies and describes the concept of Le regard médical (lit. 'the medical gaze'), and the epistemic re-organisation of the research structures of medicine in the production of medical knowledge, at the end of the eighteenth century. Although originally limited to the academic discourses of post-modernism and post-structuralism, the medical gaze term is used in graduate medicine and social work.