In the eighteenth century, the clinic was not a structure of medical experience, but it was experience at least in the sense that it was a test a test of knowledge that time must confirm, a test of prescriptions that will be proved right or wrong by the outcome, before the spontaneous jury of students: there is a sort of con test, before witnesses, with the disease, which has its own word to say, and which, despite the dogmatic speech used to designate it, possesses its own language.