Would you say your body is some sort of machine, like an object that can break down and be fixed?
In my previous blog, I raised several questions about the relationship between yoga therapy and bio-medicine. I also gave attention to the dominant status of bio-medicine in the contemporary world. And I promised to explore some aspects of bio-medicine by working with the concept of the Medical Gaze. That concept comes from Michel Foucault, and it would be good to give a little introduction to the man.
Small warning: this blog will be a little lengthy, filled with history. A history of how the body came to be a machine.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) was an influential French philosopher-historian, you may have heard of him. Not everybody likes Foucault. You could say, he was a bit of a rebel. He was mainly concerned with questions of power in society.
Among other topics, he was interested in the history of science, such as psychiatry and medicine. He approached those topics in unconventional ways. Instead of tracing the knowledge generated by scientific endeavors over time as ideas, he looked at the changes in society that made this scientific work possible. He thereby approaches the generated knowledge not as neutral objective knowledge, but as contingent on circumstances. In other words, the knowledge does not just reflect the object of that knowledge, but also the environment in which that knowledge is produced. He was looking at the making of knowledge.
Allow me to make a little detour, and speak about Foucault’s take on psychiatry before moving on to medicine. It illustrates why he drew attention to the making of knowledge. Foucault did not like psychiatry. His critique shines through in his book History of Madness. ‘Madness’ is an ‘illness’? Foucault did not agree with this definition. He challenged this ‘neutral objective’ status of madness as an illness, by tracing the historical ‘making of’ madness as illness. ‘Madness’, is poorly understood when it is portrayed solely as an illness.
Psychiatry, over time, has generated knowledge about the conditions to which the term ‘madness’ refers (schizophrenia), but it does so through a warped lens, so to say. Warped by social and political interests, that do not necessarily serve our general understanding of those conditions. This knowledge of madness as illness can even cause harm, when brought to work in clinical practice. Foucault had taken up a profession in a mental hospital as well. He knew what was going on. And he was frustrated. He was not the first to be critical of psychiatry, and it is in this time that the anti-psychiatry movement took shape.
THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC
When he later wrote his book on the history of modern medicine, The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault was less critical. For good reasons, as bio-medicine has brought many highly effective medical treatments. In his book, Foucault introduced the concept of the Medical Gaze. With the rise of modern hospitals in Paris in the 19th century, a new way of ‘seeing’ came along. This is a literal way of seeing: the eyes of doctors at work with their patients.
BEDSIDE MEDICINE
Before modern hospitals were built, the practice of medicine was organized quite differently. Medicine in the early modern period has been called ‘bedside medicine’. Doctors at this time were mainly talking with their patients. They visited their patients at their homes.
Doctors in the early modern period thought all illnesses had a single universal cause: a morbid force at work in the patient as a whole. Bodies were seen as microcosms. As doctors spoke with their patients, they sought out in which ways the patient was affected by this morbid force.
Subjective experiences and personal matters were central to the diagnostic process. Patients and those around them had a lot to say about what it was they experienced and what they needed. Doctors and patients spoke the same language and created a story around the illness together.
MODERN HOSPITALS
This changed when the first modern hospitals were built. Foucault famously stated that the central question asked by doctors changed, from ‘what is the matter with you?’, to ‘where does it hurt?’.
In the context of the modern hospital, doctors became more interested in disease in terms of a specific location within the body. In this hospital, they did not encounter a person – who is sick, but a disease – in a patient.
Doctors did not have many conversations with patients and their relatives anymore. They were now a group of doctors working in one environment, where the patient would be brought in as a rather passive bodily container of a disease.
The disease was now some sort of entity that had to be located, and this became the focus of their work. After death, a closer look in the anatomy lab – autopsy – would reveal even more knowledge about the exact location and structure of a disease.
New instruments, like the stethoscope (1816) were invented. Doctors would engage with sounds in the body, rather than with the patients themselves. Knowledge about the interiors of the body was being generated.
In those modern hospitals, the Medical Gaze was born. Locate disease, look at tissues. Observing = knowing.
However, the work of medical doctors became more and more detached from the lives and experiences of the sick persons. And doctors came to speak in a language that was largely incomprehensible to patients.
BODY AS MACHINE
The 19th century was a time in which the body came to be looked at as a machine in modern hospitals. In more recent times, the role of the doctor has been portrayed as a car mechanic. You go to the doctor, the doctor will find out which part of the body is broken, and she will fix it for you. But is this what the body is? An object, a machine?
Intuitively, many do not agree with this image of the body as a machine. Many doctors themselves resist the notion of the body purely as an object. And if you are a yoga therapist, your view of the body may be very far away from this mechanical image.
reflect now!
"GAZE AT BODY"
Through what kind of eyes do you gaze at bodies? Or otherwise, through what kind of sense do you approach the body primarily? Do you see with your eyes? Do you learn by feeling and touching with your hands? Do you learn most about the body through interoception – by bringing your attention to the internal states of your body? And what kind of body is it, through those senses, that you learn about? How would you describe the body as you know it – your body, the bodies of those who enter your yoga therapy session, and bodies in general?
References
Foucault, M. (2013). History of madness. Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2012). The birth of the clinic. Routledge.
You like what you read?
Sign-up for the newsletter and receive updates and more!
HI, I AM Niki
I am a research master student in Religious Studies and joined the Yoga Teacher Training with Network Yoga Therapy . In these blogs I aim to share with you some of the thoughts and reflections that I gather along the way. Please leave comments and share your thoughts!