The clinic, on the other hand, was thought to be the element of its positive accumulation: it was this constant gaze upon the patient, this age old, yet ever renewed attention that enabled medicine not to disappear entirely with each new speculation, but to preserve itself, to assume little by little the figure of a truth that is definitive, if not completed, in short, to develop, below the level of the noisy episodes of its history, in a continuous historicity.