[The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception] is a description of the changes in the language of medicine, particularly French medicine, between 1794 and 1820. It is therefore in the first place a work of history, concerned with a specific problem during a specific period. But it is also an experiment in a new way of writing the history of science, a testing ground for a radically redefined historical epistemology and methodology. Hence the double appeal of this book, which will be read not only by those who are interested in this seminal period of medical history but also by those who are dissatisfied with the traditional procedures of intellectual history and would like to see historians of ideas rethink their objectives and their methods.

The Birth of the Clinic, published in France in 1963, came after Foucault's Histoire de la Folie (Madness and Civilization, 1961) and preceded his...