Work · Science & Human Sciences
The Normal and the Pathological
His medical thesis, expanded in 1966: disease is not a mere quantitative deviation from the normal, as Comte and Claude Bernard held, but a different, more restricted norm of life; health is the capacity to set new norms.
Introduction
Canguilhem submitted the Essay on Some Problems concerning the Normal and the Pathological as his medical thesis in Clermont-Ferrand in 1943, during the war. Its first part examines the thesis, held by Broussais, Comte and Claude Bernard, that pathological states differ from normal ones only in quantity; its second asks whether there can be sciences of the normal and the pathological at all. Canguilhem argues that norms are set by the living being itself, that health is the capacity to set new norms and disease a reduced norm of life, and that clinical experience comes before physiology. In 1966 he republished the thesis with “New Reflections”, extending the analysis to social norms. Foucault wrote the introduction to the English translation of 1978.
Connections
Criticizes
- Course in Positive Philosophy1830 · Auguste Comte
Taken up in
- Knowledge of Life1952 · Georges Canguilhem
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