TRAILER: One Flew Over the Dead Poets Nest [MASH-UP MOVIE]

Not Simply Another Mash-up Trailer...

This is the Trailer of a REAL Mash-up Movie.

http://myspace.com/dead_poets_nest

If he's crazy, what does that make you?
He was their inspiration. He made their lives extraordinary.

The School and the Clinic:

Foucault's understanding of the development of the clinique is primarily opposed to those histories of medicine and the body that consider the late 18th century to be the dawning of a new "supposed" empirical system, "based on the rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible". On Foucault's understanding, the birth of modern medicine was not a common sensical movement towards simply seeing what was already there (and therefore a science without a philosophy), but rather a decisive shift in the structure of knowledge. That is to say, modern medicine is not a mere progression from the late 18th century wherein an understanding of the true nature of the body and disease is gradually acquired. Foucault recommends a view of the history of medicine, and clinical medicine in particular, as an epistemological rupture, rather than result of a number of great individuals discovering new ways of seeing and knowing the truth:

The clinic - constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse - owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.

Thus the empiricism of the 18th and 19th centuries is not a naive or naked act of looking and noting down what is before the doctor's eyes. The relationship between subject and object is not just the one who knows and the one who tells; the contact between the doctor and their individual patient does not pre-exist discourse as "mindless phenomenologies" would suggest. Rather, the clinical science of medicine came to exist as part of a wider structure of organising knowledge that allowed its articulation, making possible "the domain of its experience and the structure of its rationality".

Foucault would later formalise this notion in the episteme, where one epistemological era gives way to another, thus allowing one concept of what is scientific to move aside for another. In this case, as outlined in The Order of Things, the taxonomic era gave way to the organic historical era; thus, the clinic was not simply founded upon the observation of truth, and therefore more correct than any preceeding medicinal practice, but rather an artefact of a theory of knowledge inserted within a specific discursive period. The authority of the clinician relies on a relationship to the then current organisation of knowledge, instead of a relationship to a non-discursive state of affairs ('reality').

Importantly, this means that anatomists like Morgagni and Bichat were not students of the same discipline, even though their work was only thirty years apart. The epistemic change meant that the bodies, diseases, tissues and pathologies that each cut open and explored were articulated in completely different and discontinuous discourses from one another. Thus anatomy's claim to be a privileged empirical science that can observe and determine a true bodily schema cannot stand when its beginnings were not in a discovery of a way of coming to know what was real, but rather emerged amongst a new philosophical way of granting meaning and organising certain objects. Hence the use of "birth" in the title; the clinic had no origins, but simply and suddenly arrived.