Birth Of The Clinic - On Medicine, Religion and Power - Summary
During the outbreak of the Black Plague, and in the immediate aftermath of similar mass disease outbreaks such asa cholera epidemic or a tainted well, instrumental steps to quarantine require a permanent registration of all affected bodies. It is essential, then, that in order to prevent the wider spread of contagion, that these abnormalities be identified, tagged and index with a municipality official whose job it is to oversee the quarantine. Barricades are erected; safe-houses, hospitals and asylums constructed, and representative agents are dispersed to assist in the quarantine. Informants inhabit the populace and along the borders. An edict is issued to inform the carriers that until a ban has been issued, they must regularly check with their local hospital registry; institutionalized medical quarantine requires this endentured form of self-surveillance. They are indefinitely at the mercy of their own incapable bodies; exile is forbidden, expulsion prohibited, all attempts at escape threaten with death. Each member is instructed to survey their neighbors, in order to prevent further contamination and loss of medical aid. They register the plague unto themselves. They are effectively permanent carriers until the edict has been reversed; once members of their Senate decree a hopeful cure, and systematically administered by their representatives working within the township. Each carrier is at the mercy of prescription, and ultimately, to He who administers its life-promising essence weighted from their invisible hands.
The body is the site of contestation. Before registration and quarantine, it must be willing and able. The Church, from its origins as primary providers in charity hospitals, advisors to heads of feudal states, to guiding manifests of military and political destiny, has a quantifiable measure into the essential traits that characterize responsible medicine and upstanding ethical citizenship. Medical practice has an astounding influence in this sense. An unclean body, riddled with diseases transmitted as a result of faithlessness, irreverence, defiance ... is rightfully smitten with quantifiable sicknesses, less inherited at birth by plagued parents who have wantonly brought life onto earth. In cases of mental abnormality (illness without substantial origination), the remedy may be falsely beneficial. The body must be held close and watched at all times by its master and guided by its soul. Without guidance, its function and purpose are lost; without boundary, its existence is threatened. The edict set forth during quarantine, perhaps unofficially or even in fear of contamination, must be adhered to at all times lest it becomes an ultimate threat to itself. At the moment their bodies and minds willfully surrender themselves, the consequences are permanent, for the hand that takes is also the hand that gives. Its echoes resonate deeper, from the soul prescribed and ordained to it by God, their Medical Administrations, and more pervasively, the Almighty State.