Then along came Foucault's favorite social rupture: the French Revolution.

Foucault offers a detailed examination of how the radical restructuring of French society came to result in a parallel restructuring of the medical paradigm:

"There is, therefore, a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirements of political ideology and those of medical technology...Liberty is the vital, unfettered force of truth...The ideological theme that guides all structural reforms from 1789 to Thermidor Year II is that of the sovereign liberty of truth: the majestic violence of light, which is in itself supreme, brings to an end the bounded, dark kingdom of privileged knowledge and establishes the unimpeded empire of the gaze" (p. 39).

Everything that had been previously secretly contained in the arcane knowledge of medicine and medical practice must now be thrown open to the light of liberty, judged, and put into practice for the common good. With the overthrow of the selfish aristocracy, the new Republic believed that its dream of a perfect social order with no disease would quickly become a reality.

Yet, there were problems in paradise:

First of all, because of the expenses of the war, the hospitals were seen as a waste of money--people could be cared for more efficiently at home. Thus, within this new configuration, the idea of public assistance became newly conflated with the role of the doctor as a specialist in health and proper living:

"In addition to his role as a technician of medicine, [the doctor] would play an economic role in the distribution of help, and a moral, quasi-judicial role in its attribution; he would become the 'guardian of public morals and public health alike'" (p. 42) which culminated in the new figure of the "doctor-magistrate" (p. 41).

The Revolution brought about another dilemma in the new structure of medicine: since the universities were seen as the bastions of the elite, they were quickly destroyed. Thus, not only was the original organizing structure of medicine disbanded, but no one was being newly trained to take care of the sick and wounded.

"A free state that wishes to maintain its citizens free from error and from the ills that it entails cannot authorize the free practice of medicine" (p. 46), while at the same time, the very process of the Revolution was eroding the traditional foundation upon which such a regulation might be built through "the general abolition of the guids, the disappearance of the society of medicine, and, above all, the closing of the universities" (p. 46).

How to provide the population with a health care system which is free and open without being anarchical? The eventual solution would be the transition to hospitals as disparate centers for "practical training" (p. 47), in which instruction would be completely devoid of theory and the art of practice would be simultaneous with the art of teaching. The observation of practice would become the spoken lesson. Gaze and speech are unified in a single function of perception.

Yet the lack of any organization to medical practice would eventually come to haunt the new system: "The entire pedagogical and technical reorganization of medicine faltered on account of a central lacuna: the absence of a new, coherent, unitary model for the formation of medical objects, perceptions, and concepts" (p. 51). How would this new medicine progress within the limited discourse of surface practice without any theoretical depth to undergird and extend it?