David Armstrong

This book has a number of aims. First, it is an attempt to write a
sociology of medical knowledge. This project emerges from a longstanding
interest in the field that began with a monograph, Political
Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth
Century, published in 1983, and continued with a number of papers
over the intervening years. As with the previous work, my debt to
Michel Foucault’s writings is large – though this time he is placed in
historical context and therefore only appears as a recognisable
figure/author in the final chapters. In some ways, this new book can
be seen as a sequel to the earlier monograph in that themes and
ideas recur; nevertheless, the overlap of empirical material between
the two books is negligible and the ambition of the new is considerably
greater.
Secondly, this book offers a medical history of the last 150 years.
Given its relative brevity it is inevitably schematic and lacking in
the detail that might be expected from traditional historiography.
Further, the text also adapts some of the conventional customs of
historical scholarship. The need to explain Man as the outcome of
knowledge and practices means that the usual prioritising of the
person (who ‘knows’ and ‘acts’) or the social group as the agent of
history has had to be reversed. In effect, the narrative requires a
history without actors or agents, that tries to reconstruct what
exactly could be perceived at different times in the last hundred
years or so through the anonymous eye of medicine. This implies an
emphasis on text rather than authorship. To this end, the analysis
also deliberately and exclusively uses primary sources. Of course, the
story has been influenced by other texts that might better be
described as secondary sources but to allow medicine to tell its own
story these sources have been omitted except when they too can be
construed as primary.