Introduction
Humans as Subjects and Objects
It is a commonplace that humans have long been at the centre of ethical and practical issues entangled with the history of science and medicine. This is particularly so with humans as experimental subjects. In the 20th century this relationship ultimately gave rise to legal doctrines like a problematic informed consent as part of the broader evolution of human rights and medical thera- pies. Both rights and remedies have since been confined by statute in strictly narrow legal terms. In our view this also claims the late 20th century as an age of progress in which the status of participants was protected, and even defined, by those with the power and authority over the legitimacy of human experi- mentation. An historical treatment may challenge this privilege. Examining the rise of the human sciences, more than a generation ago, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things posited two great ‘discontinuities’ in the episteme of Western culture.1 The first, beginning halfway through the 17th century, was characterized as one of order and classification in which the previous search for an ancient and divine discourse in nature was abandoned in favour of a system that gave primacy to tabulation and calculation.2 To know nature now meant to observe it across a vast (artificial) table encompassing all of its myr- iad similarities and differences. It also, as Lorraine Daston more recently argued, established the moral authority of the natural world “within a com- mon framework of utility.”3 Even so, to speak of the use of knowledge was not always sufficient reason for the inclusion of man in experiment. We intend to explore the territory of observation – by the experimental operator and by the testimony of the subject which was, immediately, suspect. Curiously, the early-modern quest for a pure system of classification by which to order nature had actually excluded ‘Man’ as an object of positive knowledge – partly, perhaps, for moral reasons. If we follow Foucault, the idea of Man in a modern scientific sense did not yet exist. It was only with the second great rupture, beginning in the 18th century, that Man and ‘Life,’
1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences (New York: Routledge, 1970). 2 Ibid., 69. 3 Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 100–126, esp. 123, and 9.
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4 Ibid., 419. 5 Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 52; Also see, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1976); Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); and Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison, trans. A.M. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).