Progressive Geographies

I’ve been looking for a copy of this study for a while – Généalogie des équipements de normalisation: Les équipements sanitaires – and then a couple of copies turned up on-line in good condition and for a reasonable price. I may say more about the content in a future post, but these are the key aspects:

This is one of three volumes published by CERFI under the general title of Généalogie des équipements collectifs – the others are on schools and infrastructure. They are really research reports rather than books. I have a copy of one of the others, but the other is difficult to find – very few libraries have copies. Worldcat has the current volume also listed as Généalogie des équipements collectifs [2] Les équipements sanitaires. This record suggests that the general title of this volume is Généalogie des équipements de normalisation, but that that the series of three has the title Généalogie des équipements collectifs. Given other information (pages, date, publisher) are the same I am fairly confident these are not different texts, but library catalogues can be misleading.

This volume is 440 pages, itself in three parts, only one of which is ‘sous la direction de Michel Foucault’, entitled L’institution hospitalière au XVIII^e siècle. The other parts are on psychiatry and mental health and are authored, rather than edited.

The first part on hospitals contains Foucault’s essay ‘La politique de la santé au XVIII^e siècle’, which also appeared in the collection Les machines à guérir – originally published in 1976 and in a revised version in 1979.

The rest of the first part comprises some really interesting material, about seventy pages in length, but with no authors listed. Foucault’s chapter is signed; the rest is the product of a team of researchers led by Foucault. I’ve never seen the latter text before – I hadn’t expected this much new material. This will take some time to digest, and will require some changes to my discussion of this collaborative work in Chapter Six of Foucault’s Last Decade.

The 1976 date of this report, and the fact that this contains ‘La politique de la santé au XVIII^e siècle’ has led to confusions in some bibliographies or books on Foucault (i.e. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 522 n. 12), which misled me in previous work. I suggested that Les machines à guérir (1979) was a re-edition of Généalogie des équipements de normalisation: Les équipements sanitaires. I can now definitively say that this is not the case. Généalogie des équipements de normalisation: Les équipements sanitaires is a separate study and there was a 1976 edition of Les machines à guérir – the only overlap between them is the single essay by Foucault. Foucault’s essay was extensively revised between 1976 and the 1979 edition of Les machines à guérir, but so too was the rest of the volume. I’ve only done a cursory comparison of the other chapters so far, but one is slightly revised; two are comprehensively revised; and one is entirely different, with a new title. There are also differences to the dossier and plates between the two editions. As far as I am aware, none of the seventy pages of extra material in L’institution hospitalière au XVIII^e siècle appears anywhere else.

Until recently, only the 1976 version of Foucault’s chapter wasavailable in English translation, as ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’ (originally in Power/Knowledge, and reprinted in other places). The 1979 version is now available as Michel Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century”, translated by Richard A. Lynch, Foucault Studies, No 18, 2014, pp. 113-27. As far as I can tell none of the other chapters are available in translation.

I’ve put together a detailed bibliography of all these collaborative projects – now available here.