A BRIEF GENEOLOGY OF MEDICAL LANGUAGE

Abstract

This essay focuses on the articulation of the analysis proposed by Michel Foucault in his book “The Order of Things” and its application to the semiological models of medicine from the 15th to the 20th century. Throughout those years, a system of enunciability of accumulated knowledge, that allows the medical language to organize a corpus, was defined. This requires the relation between terms and bodies, generating rules of formation and transformation of the truth of statements. Here, their perceptive outlines, their changes, their techniques, their valuation and the hierarchy of their practices are established. As such this includes the limit of their experiences: what could be seen, resolved and outlined; in short, the conditions of production and negation of a same phenomenological field.

We can demarcate three moments in time; first the Renaissance in the 15th century, then the consolidation of the current science’s basis in 17th century’s Neoclassicism, and finally, modernism and its plurality of analysis. In conclusion we try to synthesize each historical moment, a guiding principle of its semiotics, an organising grammar of the joints, an interpretive model of phenomena, a research methodology and a hegemonic language of proposed disclosure.