Notes on Bio-History: Michel Foucault and the Political Economy of Health

Xenia Chiaramonte

doi:10.18778/0208-6069.96.09

Authors

Xenia Chiaramonte Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5074-0398

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/0208-6069.96.09

Keywords:

bio-history, social medicine, Michel Foucault, public health, institutions, COVID-19 pandemics

Abstract

In October 1974, Foucault gave three lectures in Rio de Janeiro on the archeology of the cure. This piece will comment on the first two, published a few years later in France with the original titles: Crise de la médicine ou crise de l’antimédicine? and La naissance de la médicine sociale. Bio-history is the term Michel Foucault initially uses – in the second lecture – to refer to the effect of the strong medical intervention at the biological level that started in the eighteenth century and has left a trace that is still visible in our society. It is on this occasion that Foucault introduces the concept, or rather the prefix “bio-” in his analysis, and it is here – as my reflections intend to demonstrate – that we may trace the original meaning of a term that today seems rather abused and find a valuable analytical framework for a cogent approach to the relationship between medicine and power dynamics.

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