Crisis of Medicine or Anti-Medicine?

At the moment medicine assumed its modern functions, by means of a characteristic process of nationalization, medical technology was experiencing one of its rare but extremely significant advances. The discovery of antibiotics and with them the possibility of effectively fighting for the first time against infectious diseases, was in fact contemporary with the birth of the major systems of social security. It was a dazzling technological advance, at the very moment a great political, economic, social, and legal mutation of medicine was taking place.

The crisis became apparent from this moment on, with the simultaneous manifestation of two phenomena: on the one hand, technological progress signalling an essential advance in the fight against disease; on the other hand, the new economic and political functioning of medicine. These two phenomena did not lead to the improvement of health that had been hoped for, but rather to a curious stagnation in the benefits that could have arisen from medicine and public health. This is one of the earlier aspects of the crisis I am trying to analyze. I will be referring to some of its effects to show that that the recent development of medicine, including its nationalization and socialization – of which the Beveridge Plan gives a general vision – is of earlier origin.

From Michel Foucault, Crisis of Medicine or Anti-Medicine?
Translated by Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr., William J. King and Clare O’Farrell
Foucault Studies, No 1, pp. 5-19, December 2004 [Read here]