Benoit Loiseau for The Death of the Clinic

'Divergent and elaborate in the pursuit of its enthusiasms, balancing the personal and the intellectual, The Death of the Clinic is a book of hope and affirmation as well as of pain and grief. Loiseau interleaves a love letter to his mother with a rigorous and unorthodox history of five very different experiments in the art of care. He shows how the clinics we are obliged to use might be radically reimagined and made gentler, more humane, more equitable. He doesn't shirk from scrutinizing a modern paradox: we need medicine to become more open-hearted, inclusive and holistic, while pushing back against the creeping medicalisation of our lives.' - Gavin Francis, author of The Unfragile Mind

This November, the brilliant Benoît Loiseau joins us for his fabulous new book, The Death of the Clinic.

It's bound to be a fascinating evening. We hope to see you there!

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine weaves together biography, memoir and cultural history in a groundbreaking exploration of five experimental clinics in recent Western history: a sex clinic housed in a stately mansion in Weimar Berlin; a preventive health centre in pre-NHS London; a post-war institute of psychiatry and medical philosophy in a French chateau; a feminist health centre born from the women's liberation movement in Geneva; and a grassroots research initiative featuring clinical trials run by and for people with AIDS in 1980s-90s New York.

Each of these clinics emerged in response to seismic political shifts and era-defining global events. Yet at their heart lie the stories of extraordinary individuals who dared to reimagine how we care for one another. At once deeply personal and sharply analytical, Benoit Loiseau's investigation is anchored in his own encounters with medical care and in the quiet influence of one health worker who shaped his life: his mother. In moving and reflective interludes addressed to her, Loiseau illuminates the emotional and ethical stakes of medicine today. Reframing Michel Foucault's seminal book, The Death of the Clinic is a radical invitation to rethink the clinic - not as a fixed institution but as a living, evolving practice rooted in care, resistance and collective imagination.

Benoît Loiseau is a Belgian-born, Franco-British writer, critic and scholar based in Brooklyn and Paris. A founding editor of queer anthology The BitterSweet Review, he has written for ArtReview, frieze, the Guardian, the New York Times and The White Review. He read philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure (PSL) and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in French and Comparative Literature at New York University and Paris 8 University. This is his first book.