Abstract: This article interrogates the link between the poetics of description and nosography, and emphasises the optic brought out by the “birth of the clinic” (Foucault). Perceived as a way of making speak that which is hidden, the clinical optic enables the articulation of description in the narrative and makes nosography a key moment of the account. It can legitimise a moral or a reverie about the body, and even give birth to a pathology of the marvellous in which clinical description validates the extraordinary.