3. The Free Field The contrast between a medicine of pathological spaces and a medicine of the social space was concealed from contemporaries by the visible prestige accorded to a consequence common to both: the removal from the field of all medical institutions that proved unyielding towards the new requirements of the gaze. In fact, an entirely free field of medical experiment had to be constituted, so that the natural needs of the species might emerge unblurred and without trace; it also had to be sufficiently present in its totality and concentrated in its content to allow the formation of an accurate, exhaustive, permanent corpus of knowledge about the health of a population. This medical field, restored to its pristine truth, pervaded wholly by the gaze, without obstacle and without alteration, is strangely similar, in its implicit geometry, to the social space dreamt of by the Revolution, at least in its original conception: a form homogeneous in each of its regions, constituting a set of equivalent items capable of maintaining constant relations with their entirety, a space of free communication in which the relationship of the parts to the whole was always transposable and reversible. There is, therefore, a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirements of political ideology and those of medical technology. In a concerted effort, doctors and statesmen demand, in a different vocabulary but for essentially identical reasons, the suppression of every obstacle to the constitution of this new space: the hospitals, which alter the specific laws governing disease, and which disturb those no less rigorous laws that define the relations between property and wealth, poverty and work; the association of doctors which prevents the formation of a centralized medical consciousness, and the free play of an experience that is allowed to reach the universal without imposed limitations; and, lastly, the Faculties, which recognize that which is true only in theoretical structures and turn knowledge into a social privilege. Liberty is the vital, unfettered force of truth. It must, therefore, have a world in which the gaze, free of all obstacle, is no longer subjected to the immediate law of truth: the gaze is not faithful to truth, nor subject to it, without asserting, at the same time, a supreme mastery: the gaze that sees is a gaze that dominates; and although it also knows how to subject itself, it dominates its masters: Despotism has need of darkness, but liberty, radiant with glory, can only survive when surrounded by all the light that can enlighten men; it is during the sleep of peoples that tyranny can establish itself and become naturalized among them....Make other nations tributaries not of your political authority, nor of your government, but of your talents and knowledge....There is a dictatorship for peoples whose yoke is not repugnant to those who bend under it, and that is the dictatorship of genius [1]. The ideological theme that guides all structural reforms from 1789 to Thermidor Year II is that of the sovereign liberty of truth: the majestic violence of light, which is in itself supreme, brings to an end the bounded , dark kingdom of privileged knowledge and establishes the unimpeded empire of the gaze. I. THE INVESTMENT IN HOSPITAL STRUCTURES The Comite de Mendicite de l'Assemblee Nationale was under the influence of both economists and doctors who believed that the only possible locus for recovering from disease was the natural environment of social life, the family. There the cost of sickness to the nation was reduced to a minimum, and the risk of the disease leading to artificial complications, spreading of its own accord, and assuming, as in hospitals, the aberrant form of a disease of the disease was avoided. In the family, the disease was in a state of 'nature', that is, in accord with its own nature and freely exposed to the regenerative forces of nature. The gaze that is turned upon it by those close to the sick person has the vital force of benevolence and the discretion of hope. In the freely observed disease, there is something that compensates for it: Misfortune...arouses by its presence beneficent compassion, brings to birth in men's hearts the pressing need to offer comfort and consolation, and the care given to the unfortunate in their own dwellings turns to account that abundant spring of wealth distributed by private benevolence. If the poor man is put into a hospital, he is deprived of all these re- sources...[2]. No doubt there are sick persons who have no family, and others who are so poor that they live 'cooped up in attics'. For these, 'communal houses for the sick' must be set up that would function as family substitutes and spread, in the form of reciprocity, the gaze of compassion; in this way, the poor would find 'in companions of their own kind naturally sym- pathetic creatures who are at least not entirely strangers to them' [3]. Thus disease would everywhere find its natural, or almost natural, locale, where it would be free to follow its own course and to abolish itself in its truth. --

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