《Reassessing Foucault》"Foucault Revisited: A Critical Summary"

Bodies of knowledge, on anti-medicine, and dentistry:

At first, doctor-patient relationships and patients are regarded as "the sick man," everything considered subjectively or spiritually.

Then came biomedicines, so people are considered functional bodies and treated with specific medicine for specifically classified symptoms, while doctors disappeared.

Then came debates on objectification and suspicion to medicine and the general ethics of over-application of science, so the importance of doctor-patient relationships arose again. Doctors subjectively diagnose patients as a biomedical body and an individual/singular/particular "sick man" (yes, returning to "the sick man" ideology, this time humanistic approach).

Lastly, medicine is not only what it physically is but constitutes a whole system about bodies, institutions, living people, and archaeologies:

(1) categorization; (2) assembling people into communities and dispositifs (i.e. human activities now act in the name of normalities); (3) expertise or domination of knowledge; (4) various technologies/idea systems to deal with health; (5) strategic medico-political social vocation of medicine.

Science, medicines, or the general "truth" can be invented. Refer to Deleuze.

We are defined by these "truths", for example in contemporary critic Sontags "Illness as Metaphor" she acquiesces medically defined selves.

For example, dentistry is an interesting invention.

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Consider bodies in space:

Especially in "Archaeology of Knowledge," critics find Foucaults ideas not universally applicable to circumstances as he claims. His theories can only be discussed in the context he addresses upon, unable to form a free-standing language-like rule system, though he claims it can as he is constructivist and denies humanistic/anthropological approaches.

Nevertheless, he is essential because he introduces a complex system of thought as enlightenment, and for all theories, we must think actively about them and view them as only a way of thinking rather than total acceptance, or else it will become a hegemony of knowledge.