The Normal and the Pathological (The Normal and the Pathological)

Canguilhem, Georges/ Foucault, Michel (INT)/ Fawcett, Carolyn R. (TRN)

Zone Books（1991/12発売）

Zone Books（1991/12発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 336 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780942299595
• DDC分類 610.1

Full Description

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 19th-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 19th-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. Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, 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.

Contents

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.