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October 1991
6 x 9, 328 pp.
$26.95/£19.95 (PAPER)
Trade

ISBN-10:
0-942299-59-0
ISBN-13:
978-0-942-29959-5

Other Editions
Cloth (1989)
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From Zone Books:
The Normal and the Pathological
Georges Canguilhem
Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett
Introduction by Michel Foucault


The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. 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 being objective scientific concepts. He demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.

About the Author

Georges Canguilhem is Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne and former director of the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques de l'Université de Paris. His works include La Connaissance de la Vie, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, and The Normal and the Pathological.


Reviews

"When is a disease not a disease? ... Is it valid to talk of a person being ill without a disease or having a disease without being sick? All these problems—of definition, demarcation and decision—we feel are special to medicine today. It is chastening, therefore, to be reminded that the questions underlying them were being analyzed, with great perspicacity, by the French philosopher and historian of science, Georges Canguilhem, in a work written in 1943 and now gratifyingly back in print in an English translation."
Roy Porter, London Review of Books

"A brilliant and stimulating book."
Howard L. Laye, Journal of Interdisciplinary History





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