"Medicine must no longer be confined to a body of techniques for curing ills and of the knowledge that they require; it will also embrace a knowledge of 'healthy man,' that is, a study of 'non-sick man' and a definition of the 'model man.'" Foucault argues that medicine transformed in the latter half of the 18th Century so that its purpose was no longer to treat individual patients for individual ailments but instead to create a centralized, observational, and clinical approach that could create a healthy, non-sick, and therefore productive population. That is to say, medicine for the State rather than medicine for the people. 

To completely disassociate, this week I read about the origins of the clinical gaze and positivistic medicine during the latter half of the 18th Century and the French Revolution. Wahoo! The book moves through the centralization of medical expertise and training into the State — to limit the propagation of hacks and to develop a "collective consciousness" of medical knowledge and response based on accumulated observations — while also critiquing the hospital and clinical model for exposing often impoverished families to greater vulnerability as the doctor and patient are excised from the community and household. 

A lot of interesting stuff here, though mostly in the opening chapters. This was only Foucault's second book, and you can see the emergence of later topics like surveillance, the panopticon, governmentality, bio-politics, etc. Though they're somewhat less formed here and less clear. I don't know if the second half of the book lost me because of the content shift to semiotics (YUCK!) or because of my post-election fugue state (also YUCK!).