The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical, 1963), by Michel Foucault, presents the development of la clinique, the teaching hospital, as a medical institution, identifies and describes the concept of Le regard médical (lit.

[1] In the genealogy of medicine—knowledge about the human body—the term Le regard médical (The medical gaze) identifies the doctor's practice of objectifying the body of the patient, as separate and apart from their personal identity.

In the treatment of illness, the intellectual and material structures of la clinique, the teaching hospital, made possible the inspection, examination, and analysis of the human body, yet the clinic was part of the socio-economic interests of power.

[2] In the 18th century, when the French (1789–1799) and the American (1775–1783) revolutions inaugurated the Modern era those events also established a meta-narrative of scientific discourse that presented scientists as sages—specifically, the medical doctors—who would abolish sickness and resolve the problems of humanity.

[3] Foucault's thesis about the birth of the clinic (teaching hospital) contradicts the histories of medicine that present the late 18th century as the beginning of a new empirical system "based on the rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible" material reality.