The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine weaves together biography, history and personal reflection in a groundbreaking exploration of five experimental clinics in recent Western history. A sex clinic housed in a stately mansion in Weimar Berlin. A preventive health centre in pre-NHS London. A radical institute of psychiatry and medical philosophy in a post-war French chateau. A feminist health centre born from the women’s liberation movement in Geneva. A grassroots research initiative featuring clinical trials run by and for people with AIDS in 1980s-90s New York. Each of these clinics emerged in response to seismic political shifts and era-defining global events – yet at their heart lie the stories of extraordinary individuals who dared to reimagine how we care for one another. At once deeply personal and sharply analytical, Benoît Loiseau’s investigation is anchored in his own encounters with medical care and in the quiet influence of one health worker who shaped his life: his mother. In moving and reflective interludes addressed to her, Loiseau illuminates the emotional and ethical stakes of medicine today. Reframing Michel Foucault’s seminal text, The Death of the Clinic is a radical invitation to reimagine the clinic – not as a fixed institution, but as a living, evolving practice rooted in care, resistance and collective imagination.
