Prescribing autonomy in medicine

The article deals with the injunction of autonomy which has shaped, through varying discourses, the past hundred years of medicine. It shows how this process has occurred, first, at a physical level and then toward a moral register - and how it has gone from an object to be restored towards an object to be respected - and, then, from the ethical field toward the legal one. Based on social science literature dedicated to this theme, it analyzes the various sources which are at the beginning of autonomy's instruction. Having described a continuous process of redefining the concept, the articles concludes by underlining the necessity of undertaking empirical inquiries dedicated to this notion to render it analyzable in the variety of its implementations.