Sat.Sep 07, 2024

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The Iatrogenic Gaze: How We Forgot That Psychiatry Could Be Harmful

Mad in America

M ichel Foucault begins his work on the history of modern medicine, The Birth of the Clinic , with this enigmatic statement: “This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.” Here, he coined a term which has become commonplace in the sociological study of medicine: “the medical gaze” For Foucault, clinical observation—the way in which a doctor examines a patient—is not scientifically impartial.