(no subject)

[timelets]

Foucault writes about the emergence of a new hospital in the 19th century:

The decisive factor for the epistemolog- ical ‘thaw’ of medicine at the end of the eighteenth century was the organization of the hospital as an ‘examining’ apparatus.
...
This had two consequences: in the internal hierarchy, the physician, hitherto an external element, begins to gain over the religious staff and to relegate them to a clearly specified, but subordinate role in the technique of the examination; the category of the ‘nurse’ then appears; while the hospital itself, which was once little more than a poorhouse, was to become a place of training and of the correlation of knowledge; it represented a reversal therefore of the power relations and the constitution of a corpus of knowledge.

- we go from the four humors to ailing organs discovered through autopsies; a dramatic increase in diseases identified
- descriptions of diseases (Morgagni); diagnosis, mostly useless; - new aboutness;
- systematic observation by doctors performed in pre-autopsy - hospital
- examination of the patient - new power
- insurance business: from life insurance to health insurance; new power
- HMOs - doctors lost their examination power; new power
- the new generation of sensors and data analysis; new power (?)