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Normal and the pathological georges canguilhem

History of Science, Philosophy

The Normal and the Pathological

Georges Canguilhem

Introduction by Michel Foucault
Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett
Details

336 pp

Published: 1991

6 x 9

Paperback

$32.00

ISBN: 9780942299595

Hardcover

Out of Print

ISBN: 9780942299588

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.

“A brilliant and stimulating book.” — Journal of Interdisciplinary History