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Introduction 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. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/9789004�867�9_00� <UN> 2 Introduction understood not just simply as sentient but as things with organic structure, also gave rise to specialized scientific disciplines of transformation in biology and comparative anatomy. By the 19th century, it was not solely a creature’s visible comparative anatomy that dictated its place in nature, but instead the viable, reproductive, dynamic of its organic, reproductive, function. The immense con- sequence of this shift was that Man was simultaneously inserted into a discourse of nature, while nonetheless remaining arbiter of the very knowledge upon which that very discourse was based. Foucault concluded by warning against any positivist notions that the modern sciences allowed us to escape from the questions raised throughout the early modern and modern periods, stating instead that the episteme that began in the 19th century “still forms the imme- diate space of our reflection.”4 Foucault’s work had challenged scholars to confront both the continuities and ruptures intertwined with the rise of scientific knowledge in Western culture. But there is a another question Foucault sought to address in various works – as in The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization and in Discipline and Punish – which placed the body under an institutional gaze or view. This leads us to the question of the relationship between the experience of investigation and control. In response to a question in 1975, Foucault asserted that, in the everyday, “knowledge constantly induces effects of power.”5 In its incisive challenge of a Whig view of the history of science and the progress of knowledge, The Order of Things had highlighted the questions raised in the 17th century and still extant regarding humanity’s ambiguous place as both object and subject of scientific and medical knowledge. This commanding yet tenuous position is even further complicated when set against the historically fluid sensitivities of religious, medical, gendered, and racial boundaries. The current collection may affirm Foucault’s chronological and epistemo- logical framework as an important meta-narrative that can nonetheless be complemented by a closer, more nuanced, gaze. Several of these essays make clear that there existed an ethical consciousness in the early-modern world – variously scientific, religious, or metaphysical – that often determined the parameters of experimentation, and refined the acceptance of, or resistance to, 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). <UN>.
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