Abstract
This chapter returns to questions about experimentation, first presenting François Dagognet’s investigation of medical empiricism and appeal to a clinical anthropology as an attempted extension of Canguilhem’s work. I find Canguilhem’s response in his return to René Leriche. Whereas Dagognet implies that medicine’s empiricism arises from its impotence before nature and conceals clinical knowledge of man, Canguilhem questions humanist medicine by insisting that therapeutics today works by wounding and medicine has become anti-natural. His “Therapeutics, Experimentation, and Responsibility,” I show, considers further consequences in describing the medical crisis afflicting industrial societies. Medicine, he finds, has become perhaps the pre-eminent political problem for modern societies, providing no anthropology. I conclude by considering Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic as a critical extension from Canguilhem’s essay.
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Notes
- 1.
See Canguilhem (1947, 306).
- 2.
It could be fruitful to read Foucault’s thinking about the future of medicine and his own interest in and use of drugs in relation to this utopian rationalism.
- 3.
- 4.
His example of this reasoning says it all: “Gout is not reducible to a simple precipitation [of uric acid], nor does it play out solely in the big toe, it appears to involve the entire human being, including their heredity” (Dagognet 1955, 92).
- 5.
See, for example, Lifton (2000).
- 6.
See Bruno Halioua (2002).
- 7.
Through this essay, we might find Canguilhem’s importance for a wider range of authors than usually imagined. Consider, for example, Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency ([1970] 2017), which perhaps partially follows his example in developing an anti-dogmatic and unorthodox Marxist analysis of desire.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
François Delaporte continues this form of argumentation in his discussion of the face transplant (Delaporte 2013).
- 11.
This suggests another difference with Dagognet, in his claim that medical empiricism is a kind of natural ruse, a superstition that allows doctors to go on in their endeavors. Canguilhem finds, instead, that it is the belief in the scientific status of their work that plays this role in medical education.
- 12.
See the discussion of Duveau in Chapter 1 of this book.
- 13.
Following the French, I give the title of Foucault’s book without adding a definite article.
- 14.
Canguilhem, as we saw in Chapter 4, insisted in the early 1950s that the history of culture is defined by alterations and transformations. Yet at other points he seems to suggest an unchanging essence for medical activity. Macherey suggests that Birth’s primary critique of Canguilhem is seen in its substitution of an archeology for phenomenology, that is, its substitution of a method that captures historical alteration for a method that grasps the unchanging structures of experience (1998, 111). I maintain that the situation is more complex since Canguilhem’s own work moves in the direction of archeology and worries about the implications of phenomenology.
- 15.
- 16.
This is my translation. The English omits the last sentence here.
- 17.
Around the same time that Birth was published, however, Canguilhem found that we can no longer make this claim with Bichat. See Chapter 8 for more on this.
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Talcott, S. (2019). Experimentation and the Crisis of Medicine. In: Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00779-9_7
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