"A brilliant and stimulating book."

Autorentext

Georges Canguilhem Introduction by Michel Foucault Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett

Klappentext

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the nineteenth century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.

Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early nineteenth century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from objective scientific concepts. He demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.

Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, among others, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought.

Inhalt
Part 1 Essay on some problems concerning the normal and the pathological: is the pathological state merely a quantitative modification of the normal state? - introduction to the problem - Auguste Compte and "Broussais's Principle" - Claude Bernard and experimental pathology - the conceptions of Rene Leriche - implications of a theory; do sciences of the normal and the pathological exist? - introduction to the problem - a critical examination of certain concepts - norm and average - disease, cure, health - physiology and pathology - conclusion. Part 2 New reflections on the normal and the pathological: twenty years later; from the social to the vital; on organic norms in Man; a new concept in pathology - error; epilogue.