In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.

In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes -- in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.

米歇爾·福柯（1926-1984）齣生於法國維埃納省省會普瓦捷。曾任裏爾大學助教、瑞典烏普薩拉大學法語教師、波蘭華沙大學法國文化中心主任、突尼斯大學哲學教授，1972年就任法蘭西學院思想體係史教授。福柯對包括精神病學、瘋癲史、性、臨床醫學等在內的人文科學諸領域進行瞭廣告而卓越的研究，他的著何作如《精神病與人格》、《詞與物》、《瘋癲史》、《性史》、《臨床醫學的誕生》等對於當代人文科學的研究都有著巨大的國際影響。