Thus, Foucault explains: "The medicine of species implies, therefore, a free spatialization for the disease, with no privileged regions, no constraint imposed by hospital conditions--a sort of spontaneous division in the setting of its birth and development that must function as the paradoxical and natural locus of its own abolition. At the place in which it appears, it is obliged, by the same movement, to disappear. It must not be fixed in a medically prepared domain, but be allowed, in the positive sense to the term, to 'vegetate' in its original soil: the family, a social space conceived in its most natural, most primitive, most morally secure form, both enclosed upon itself and entirely transparent, where the illness is left to itself." (p. 18)

As such, the means of societal assistance coincided with the political thought of the time such that the way by which society helped to treat the sick, especially the poor, was through a monetary compensation to the family, within which the diseased were fostered and supported in their natural environment. Yet, it is a shift in this very "free" method of assistance that will result in an entire reordering of the medical field as the French Revolution sweeps across the country and places the medical community within the realm of government supervision: "The medicalization of individual perception, of family assistance, of home care can be based only on a collectively controlled structure, or on one that is integrated into the social space in its entirety. At this point, a quite new form, virtually unknown in the eighteenth century, of institutional spatialization of disease, makes its appearance. The medicine of spaces disappears." (p. 20)