The area of health and medicine is a huge public policy issue. It is always in the news in terms of system failure: hospital waiting lists, lack of public funds, rising costs, cancelled emergency surgery.The focus is usually on the public hospital and the overlapping jurisdictions between states and commonwealth.
Behind this sits a many stranded medical discourse on sickness and medicine which is rarely discussed or mentioned. This discourse involves medical governance, medical science, disease and sickness, technological interventions, political power and medical knowledge, methods of research, biological reductionism etc.
Foucualt is seen to have a lot to say on this in terms of the concept ofdiscourse, the critique of the medicalization thesis, the analysis of the body and the self, bio-power and a governmentality analysis of health policy, health promotion, and the consumption of health. A lot of this discussion in academe takes place within medical sociology.
My initial attraction to Foucault's exploration of the sickness/healing discourse is the way he turns a sceptical or critical eye on the modernist metanarratives of medicine in modernity: doctors as the scientific experts winning the war against disease. The medicos act as bearers of the scientific enlightenment that had awakened modern liberal society from, and thrown off, the yoke of the dark medieval superstitions that kept us in a state of ignorance.
Foucault called this the medical gaze. The gaze of the physicans in modernity could penetrate illusions of sickness and the appearances othe symptons to see through to the underlying reality of disease. The physician had the power of science to see the hidden truth.
In the process the scientific medicos who governed our bodies had developed their own myths. A central one is the all wise and the all knowing doctor who uses science to guard our health, and to keep the "quacks" (the allied health professionals) from becoming a part of public medicine.