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How long does it take to read The Birth of the Clinic?

Michel Foucault

The Birth of the Clinic by Michel Foucault takes about 3 hours 57 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 3 hours 57 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1963. 215 pages, about 59,125 words.

8 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 6 hours 34 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 3 hours 57 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 28 minutes

The page count is the median across 22 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible. In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes - in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death." --

Subjects: Modern History of Medicine, Philosophy, Medicine, History of Medicine, History, Médecine

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