This book, as Foucault wrote in the afterword, is an attempt to arrive at a method in the tangled, poorly structured field of the history of ideas. This method, which Foucault conceived as an archaeology of the human sciences, operates here on what seems to be a narrow historical basis: the history of medicine at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. This is not only the era of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but also one of a dramatic change in the human self-image, which first leads to tangible consequences in medicine. The reorganization of the hospital system, the emergence of the modern clinic and its separation from medical practices, the systematic examination of corpses and the resulting pathological anatomy, the unveiling of the body's interior, and the new medical specialties.