Thus armed with the powerful conceptual apparatus of the anatomo-clinical gaze, doctors began to reconstitute the field of medicine by establishing "the visible invisible." Paramount among these developments were:

 

the concept of pathological life

 

the unity of perception

 

the visibility of the individual

And, that's about it....The new medical perceptual structure is in place, and Foucault has completed his job. He has brought us full circle from where he began in the Preface and located us back within the long sought realm of the individual:

"The task lay with this language of things, and perhaps with it alone, to authorize a knowledge of the individual that was not simply of a historic or aesthetic order. That the definition of the individual should be an endless labour was no longer an obstacle to an experience, which, by accepting its own limits, extended its task into the infinite. By acquiring the status of object, its particular quality, its impalpable colour, its unique, transitory form took on weight and solidity. No light could now dissolve them in ideal truths; but the gaze directed upon them would, in turn, awaken them and make them stand out against a background of objectivity. The gaze is no longer reductive, it is, rather, that which establishes the individual in his irreducible quality. And thus it becomes possible to organize a rational language around it. The object of discourse may equally well be a subject, without the figures of objectivity being in any way altered. It is this formal reorganization, in depth, rather than the abandonment of theories and old systems, that made clinical experience possible; it lifted the old Aristotelian prohibition: one could at last hold a scientifically structured discourse about an individual" (p. xiv).