Medicina, corpo, educação

Abstract

The present work aimed to investigate the appearance of the body in the western culture history, as well as the resultant changes in the hospital context, and in the health professionals experience and discourse starting from the late eighteenth century. This is a theoretical bibliographic research, based on Michel Foucault, specially on the work The Birth of the Clinic (1963). During the development of this research we sought to consider mainly the thought and the "toolbox" used by Foucault and by other foucaultian interlocutors in order to understand the Modern Age, which, as the author, comprehended the history of medical look archeology. We reflected on the changes occurred in the hospital context during the transition between the history of medicine/philosophy and clinical medicine/body in France and in the West from the late eighteenth century until the Modern Age, showing that the modern disease affected the body and it had a history of life and death. The Classical Age began with the medicine of species. The disease was understood as an entity outside of the body, as an organized and hierarchical framework in families and in genera. It was classificatory and it favored the superficial look not trying to unfold what was hidden, not revealing secrets. In the Modern Age, in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, medicine acquired new knowledge along with great discoveries. A new world had aroused; the change of the superficial, shallow space of representation into the real, objective and deep space. A meaningful moment of the Modern Age, according to Foucault's reflection, was when the French anatomist physician Bichat, by the opening of the corpse, declared that the truth of the disease was in the death. The anatomy of the body allowed the disease to announce its truth in the seeing and hearing, in the looking and listening. Previously hidden objects were revealed, and were interrogated by Foucault such as: life, language, work, the patient and the hospital. The doctor look pervaded the interior of the ill body, setting some standards and rules to the patient and to the medical/hospital context. Modern thought showed that the hospital was the right place where the health professionals could develop their experiences and discourses. Medicine has been the profession that has led the changes in the field of health and these changes have reflected on the other professions in the hospital area. Therefore, there was a slight change in the speeches that brought out new ways that determined the orthopedic of health, education, school, body, hospital context and the training of health professionals. Michel Foucault analysed what was present in each speech and in each age, for the discourse had changed; it was no longer the same. We cannot deny that the experience of looking deeply generated many changes that revolutionized medicine.