Genealogy of Diagnostics : Michel Foucault and his The Birth of the Clinic

This text deals with the genealogy of methods of diagnosis, using an interpretation of some of the major Michel Foucault's works, namely The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974–1975, The Archaeology of Knowledge, The History of Madness in the Classical Age and other. The text is divided into few parts: firstly, Foucault's archaeological and genealogical approach to history is analyzed, secondly I pay attention to three medical discourses that existed in France since the end of 18th century until 1850's, that are described in The Birth of the Clinic. It is a medicine of pathological species (classification medicine), a medicine of symptoms and a medicine of organs. Foucault introduces these three medical discourses chronologically one after another, but they are in fact interconnected and they form the basis of contemporary medical discourse. In the third part of the text I develop Foucault's conception of normal and abnormal individual in the context of health and illness, and I pay special attention to stigmatization of people who are considered "abnormal" or "ill". Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, describes many diagnostic methods and some of them I analyze in further parts of the text. Diagnostics, analysis of spatial aspects of disease, analysis of roles of symptoms and signs, technique of medical interview and others form the principles of (contemporary) medical reasoning. The end of the text deals with the relation between medicine and psychiatry as described at Foucault's. I follow Foucault's explanation of how psychiatry became a part of medicine and I ask the question whether it is legitimate. I analyze the usage of medical diagnostic methods in psychiatry and I try to answer whether the inclusion of psychiatry into medicine caused the stigmatization of psychiatric patients (as Foucault claims), or, on the contrary, whether it helped to stop it.