Nosographie et poétique du descriptif L'optique clinique

This article interrogates the link between the poetics of description and nosography, and emphasises the optic brought out by the “birth of the clinic” (Foucault). Perceived as a way of making speak that which is hidden, the clinical optic enables the articulation of description in the narrative and makes nosography a key moment of the account. It can legitimise a moral or a reverie about the body, and even give birth to a pathology of the marvellous in which clinical description validates the extraordinary.