Michel Foucault analyzed how knowledge and power interact and are used as social control. He viewed medicine not just as healing but as a social institution. For Foucault, the body is a social construct that reflects the priorities of different time periods, and modern medicine aims to manage and control populations through techniques like surveillance. Foucault argued that power operates throughout society, including through institutions like medicine, and shapes our understanding of the body, health, and normality.

1. MEESUM KAZMI
BS SOCIOLOGY
(SUBJECT)
SOCIOLOGY OF HEALTH &
MEDICINE
BZU MULTAN, PAKISTAN

2. TOPIC
FOUCAULT & SOCIOLOGY
OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE.

3. MICHEL FOUCAULT
• Paul-Michel Doria Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of
ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories
primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and
how they are used as a form of social control through societal
institutions.
• He was post modernist & post structuralist.

4. • There are considerable parallels between the work of Parsons and the French
thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984).
• Neither considers medicine to be mainly about healing. Both see it as an
institution of social control.
• Both demystify medicine and its claims to scientificness.
• For Parsons, this can be the motivated deviance to Sick role can be subsumed
• For Foucault, it is the identification of the sick person as diseased by the helping
professions
• Modern societies are bureaucratic societies and Information needs to be generated,
monitored evaluated and used as the basis of planning.

5. FOUCAULT: THE MOST
GENERAL PICTURE
• Knowledge is power
• Power is not a thing but a relation, power is not simply repressive but it is productive, power is
not simply a property of the state. Rather, power is exercised throughout the social body.
• Power operates at the most micro levels of social relations. Power is omnipresent at every level
of the social body.
Types of power:
1. Sovereign power
Sovereign power involves Physical coercion.
2. Disciplinary power
Disciplinary power involves surveillance and monitoring. disciplinary power is about training the
actions of bodies.
3. Bio power
Biopower involves managing populations, bio power is about managing the births, deaths,
reproduction of a population

6. Further classification in bio-power is given as:
Anatomo-politics:
The internalization of scientific concepts of health and normality, which
are administered by professional groups on the basis of their claim to
scientific knowledge.
Bio-politics:
The linking of the human body to organized knowledge so as to achieve
social control - provide a link between the individual and social
structures.

7. FOUCAULT'S SOCIOLOGY
OF HEALTH
• Foucault's work, in particular. The Birth of the Clinic (1973)) analyses medical
knowledge as the product of a specific historical period.
• Medicine is a manifestation of an administered society in which the centralization
of information about citizens is essential for social planning.
• Marxists focus on the economy, and Parsons on the social system, Foucault
focuses on the development of the bureaucratic state.
Norbert Elia argues against Weber and Foucault, “Developmental process in the
West is a progressive, liberalizing and humanizing one.”

8. • For Foucault following Weber, the development of scientific medicine,
the internalization of norms of hygiene, and the development of a state
administrative structure to enforce public health are all aspects of
Weber's Iron Cage.
• The key to Foucault's analysis is the demographic transition of the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this period, there were more live
births which combined with economic developments.
• Foucault argues that as the new cities developed and capitalism
matured, new forms of knowledge about people developed.

9. POWER/KNOWLEDGE
• This new knowledge was of people as objects to be counted and monitored, or, to
use Foucault's word, surveyed.
• New disciplines of knowledge developed whose aims were to predict/control the
behaviours of individuals and to provide the state with information to
control/monitor these individual.
• They established the scientific criteria by which we categorised people like,
criminals, insane, disabled etc.
• This leads to Foucault's central insight:
The development of modern social and medical science is the development of
sophisticated power/knowledge.

10. FOUCAULT'S HISTORY
OF MEDICINE
• The period from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century was one of
Bedside medicine doctors were dependent on the patient.
• Disease was something that happened to the whole person and was
conceptualized as a lack of balance in the human being involving both
physical and spiritual factors.
• The ethos of the period can be summarized in the doctor's question:
What is the matter with you?

11. • The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and urbanization resulted in the growth of
huge hospitals to house the sick, and marks the period of Hospital medicine
• The patient became dependent on the now professional doctor, while disease becomes a problem
of the pathology of a specific organ distance from the whole existence of the individual.
• The question directed by the doctor at the patient. Where does it hurt?‘
• From the mid-twentieth century on is the period of Laboratory medicine.
• In which both doctors and patients are displaced by scientific tests.
• A cellular theory of disease is developed. Disease becomes biochemical process .
• Healing no longer depends on any ability of the practitioner, but is caught in the phrase “ Lets
wait and see what the tests say”

12. THE BODY
• The Body is the product of social changes as well as factors intrinsic to sociological theory.
• The body as a carrier of commodities and lifestyles, everywhere has highlighted the role of body as a symbolic
marker of social status.
• Medical technology increasingly renders concepts of a “natural” body almost impossible to hold , and has
highlighted the social shaping of the body.
• Marx and Engels both critically evaluated Darwinian biology as the product of liberalism and utilitarianism.
• The status of the body, whether defined medically or in racial or gendered terms, has come to be seen as a social
accomplishment and not the product of science or nature.
• On the one hand, our bodies are socially constructed within the context of class, gender and ethnicity, on the other
hand, the awareness of this social constructedness opens up alternative discourses of resistance, or of reform to the
structural shaping of our bodily selves.

13. HISTORICAL AND METAPHORICAL
REPRESENTATION OF BODY
• The human body may be described as a physical reality, but it is simultaneously a metaphorical
reality.
• Understandings of the body reflect their social and cultural period.
• In medieval times, the body was conceptualized theologically as the reflection of God's divine
plan.
• Speech disorders, for example, were seen as manifestations of the effect of the soul on the body,
rather than mal functioning physical parts.
• Descartes, who drew an analogy between the body and the performance of clockwork.
• Foucault has argued, the task of genealogy is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and
the process of history's destruction of the body.

14. THE CARTESIAN VIEW OF
BODY
1. Dualistic:
The mind and the body are sharply distinguished.
2. Reductionist:
The material , physical base is the determinant factor in causal
explanations.
3. Positivist:
The methods of the natural sciences are the legitimate ones for
the study of human beings.

15. FOUCAULT’S BODY
• Foucault argues body as a transient social and cultural artifact, and not a part of
nature.
• In the context of medical thought, Foucault argues that the crucial concepts of
body and disease must be seen as historical products.
• Foucault gives special attention to the body because it is centrally located in the
disciplines of criminology, medicine and sexology.
• We have an image of our own body and we are the body.
• Foucault talks about a biopolitics. It is on the basis of the establishment of the
body by medicine that we are subject to specific mechanisms of social control.

16. THE ANATOMICO-METAPHYSICAL
REGISTER OF BODY
• Foucault argues that the medicine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
produced an anatomico-metaphysical register of the body.
• By and large, sickness, insanity and criminality were not distinguished. The sole
aim of therapy was to physically discipline the body through incarceration,
bleeding and leeching.
• Under a system of retributive justice, the focus was on the physical breaking of the
body to enforce conformity and obedience.

17. THE TECHNICO-POLITICAL
REGISTER OF BODY
• Modern medicine produces a technico-political register of the body for submission
and use of the body/mind through the regulations of the factory, the prison, the
hospital and the asylum.
• The body has been reconstructed: a materialist reduction of the soul .
• Under a system of Restitutive justice, the focus is on the moral reintegration of the
individual by specialized institutions and workers - hospitals, prisons and asylums,
doctors, criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists.
• Rather than breaking the body, the aim is rehabilitation.
• As Williams has shown, the physical body has all but disappeared in modern
techno-medicine.

18. • We have plastic bodies, bionic/interchangeable bodies, genetically
engineered designer babies, and the virtual bodies of the new surgical
techniques in which surgeons operate at a distance on TV screens of the
patient's body.
• The plasticity of the body is now a taken for granted.
• Our bodies can be remade on demand, and the expectation is becoming
more socially or sexually desirable as partners.
• We now have bionic/interchangeable bodies, which range from the
'fully' human with no implants to those with pacemaker and other
implants.

19. CONCLUSION
• His historical analysis of medicine has relativized our understanding of the body as specific to
society and not to nature.
• Foucault points out that he is not passing judgment on whether or not this is good system of
control.
• Human knowledge depends on the society which gives rise to it, and as societies changes, so
does knowledge and truth.
• Foucault argues that power flows through all social relationships. It is not a tool wielded by one
group over another
• In his analysis of the development of the medical profession, he has demonstrated how modern
society is dependent on individuals internalizing norms of correct behaviour, which are based on
a claimed scientific foundation, and enforced by professional groups with state sanctions to
back them up.

20. REFRENCE
Book: An introduction to sociology of
health and illness (Kevin White) Chapter
07, Page No. 119-131

21. ANY QUESTIONS?
THANK YOU!