 Three other factors were of much more positive significance for the young Foucault. First, there was the French tradition of history and philosophy of science, particularly as represented by Georges Canguilhem, a powerful figure in the French University establishment, whose work in the history and philosophy of biology provided a model for much of Foucault’s work in the history of the human sciences. Canguilhem sponsored Foucault’s doctoral thesis on the history of madness and, throughout Foucault’s career, remained one of his most important and effective supporters. Canguilhem’s approach to the history of science (an approach developed from the work of Gaston Bachelard), provided Foucault with a strong sense (in some ways Kuhnian avant la lettre, see entry on  scientific revolutions, section 5.3)  of the discontinuities in scientific history, along with a “rationalist” understanding of the historical role of concepts that made them independent of the phenomenologists’ transcendental consciousness. Foucault found this understanding reinforced in the structuralist linguistics and psychology developed, respectively, by Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan, as well as in Georges Dumézil’s proto-structuralist work on comparative religion. These anti-subjective standpoints provide the context for Foucault’s marginalization of the subject in his “structuralist histories”, The Birth of the Clinic (on the origins of modern medicine) and The Order of Things (on the origins of the modern human sciences).