The Ancient Medicine: an existential ethic in Michel Foucault

Abstract

This paper seeks stand out Michel Foucault’s interpretation about the Greco-Roman medicine in the ancient world. More than be a therapeutic medicine, this practice was assumed like an ethical project. From different prescriptive texts developed by philosophers, moralists and physicians, Foucault suggests that the health entails freedom. The general use of the body became in a subject of concern for whom desire “stylize their lives”. Underline these features of western ancient medicine allows tracing a genealogy of current moral values linked to the self contemporary culture.