«Power» in times of Population. Foucault and the medicalization of the modern city

Abstract

This paper explores, primarily from Michel Foucault's research, the various political, economic and social forms that emerged from the relationship between the city and medicine in light of the installation of the term "population" as a modern problem. Focusing on the analysis in the development of management technologies of the population, the study seeks to explain how, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hygienism, sanitation and medicine exerted an action that operated beyond the classic boundaries defined by the disease, assistance and care, achieving its progressive installation in various fields of individual and collective existence. This meant that the process of socialization of medicine also brought the "medicalization" of the city and all of those who lived in it.