Medicine: 30 years after the death of the great humanist.

Abstract

Having been the son, grandson and great-grandson of physicians, was not easy to tell his father that he would not continue the family tradition. But, despite this decision, throughout his life he maintained a strong relationship with medicine, dedicating some of his most significant works. In this regard, his vision could be summarized as: science and technology have brought many advances in medicine, but also engendered increasingly serious ethical challenges. Amongst them worsening health conditions and existence of a majority of those excluded progress and actual aggression to the supreme ethical values. Therefore, Foucault positions critically derivatives based on ethical values of human dignity. In addition to scientific training is required for the formation of a moral conscience and criticism. This knowledge is not knowledge driven or the advancement of medical science, but of course that can be given to teaching whose priority is not neglect-humanistic ethics of scientific medicine, always humanizing dimension. After the violent criticizes psychiatry deployed in History of Madness, in The Birth of the Clinic accepts scientificity of medicine, noting that the clinic is the articulation of things “in a language in which we have recognizing positive science ". Along with this positivist praise of medicine, Foucault reveals his fascination with the subject of death. The link established between the death and medicine, beyond what anatomo - clinical relates to the issue of human finitude. Proof of this is the approach that operates between medical expertise and experience of finitude lyric in Holderlin and Rilke. Death can be averted: Medicine announces relentless man wearing limit in itself, yet it also speaks of "the technical world that is armed, positive and full form of his finitude”. Foucault was concerned man holistically: just psychosomatic unity taken as a man can be considered subject. Hence his criticism of psychiatry and psychoanalysis can be attributed to this conception of man as the subject of its own shares, considering that for the philosopher, in these medical or paramedical practices, the patient is not subject but object of medical knowledge. Medicine constitutes an ethical space of existence, considering that ethics is an absolute priority in the relationship established between doctor and patient. On the other hand, does not exhaust the ethical humanistic or it is reduced to ethics; humanistic has