Michel Foucault - Madness And Civilization

Author:Madness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Michel Foucault, madness, medicine

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ment of a fluid enclosed in a malleable container, in a bladder, for example, that when I press it would eject liquid through a tube") and a corpuscular movement for sensation ("this is the movement of a succession of ivory balls"). Thus sensation and movement can be produced at the same time in the same nerve: any tension and any relaxation in the fiber will alter both movements and sensations, as we can observe in all nervous diseases.

And yet, despite all these unifying virtues of the nervous system, is it certain that we can explain, by the real network of its fibers, the cohesion of such diverse disorders as those which characterize hysteria or hypochondria? How conceive the liaison among the signs that from one part of the body to the other betray the presence of a nervous affection? How explain, and by tracing what line of connection, that in certain "delicate and highly sensitive" women a heady perfume or the too vivid description of a tragic event or even the sight of a combat produces such an impression that they "fall into syncopes or suffer convulsions"? One seeks in vain: no precise liaison of the nerves;

no path proceeding from the original cause; but only a remote, indirect action which is rather on the order of a physiological solidarity. This is because the different parts of the body possess a "very determined faculty, which is either general and extends throughout the entire system of animal economy, or particular and influences certain parts principally." This very distinct property of both "the faculty of feeling and that of moving" which permits the organs to communicate with each other and to suffer together, to react to a stimulus, however distant—is sympathy. As a matter of fact, Whytt succeeded neither in isolating sympathy in the ensemble of the nervous system, nor in defining it in relation to sensibility and to movement. Sympathy exists in the organs only insofar as it is received there through the intermediary of the nerves; it is the more

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marked in proportion to their mobility, and at the same time it is one of the forms of sensibility: "All sympathy, all consensus presupposes sentiment and consequently can exist only by the mediation of the nerves, which are the only instruments by which sensation operates." 18 But the nervous system is no longer invoked here to explain the exact transmission of a movement or a sensation, but to justify, in its totality and its mass, the body's sensibility with regard to its own phenomena, and its own echo across the volumes of its organic space.

Diseases of the nerves are essentially disorders of sympathy; they presuppose a state of general vigilance in the nervous system which makes each organ susceptible of entering into sympathy with any other: "In such a state of sensibility of the nervous system, the passions of the soul, violations of diet, sudden alternation of heat and cold or of heaviness and humidity of the atmosphere, will very readily produce

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