Normal and Pathological
George Canguilhem “Knowledge of Life” discusses how physician’s thoughts and actions are not understandable without the concept of normal and pathological. He then goes in detail about the meanings of these words related to medical judgment. The philosophical question he asks is “Normal” the same as “healthy” and is “pathological” the same as “abnormal.”
Pathological by definition is involving, caused by, or the nature of a physical or mental disease; example he gave in the text is daltonism, which is a form of color blindness. It is classified as pathological because it is something that happens abnormally to the healthy and something can be done to fix it or can be fix by the person dying. Normal is related a person being healthy but the question arose is getting ill an abnormal thing, or should illness be apart of the normal. He states “normal” is very ambiguous because one way it could refer to statistical sampling or an ideal positive principal of evaluation, because of this the normal will always be unclear.
In the later paragraphs he describes living beings as being “a system of laws or as an organization of properties”. He states that scientists believe that a singular phenomenon is a failure, defect, or an impurity, making it irregular. A relationship of law to the phenomenon model, proposed by the scientists, compares genus and individual. According to Claude Barnard’s observations that when truth is in the type, then the reality is always different. He shows this when he describes individualism within each person and type. Pure physical entities do not encounter the difficulty faced by physicians. When we make the norm based on individual, we seem to erase the boundaries between the normal and pathological. Meaning a sick man does not move within universes and become a different person.
Work Cited:
Canguilhem, Georges. “The Normal and the Pathological.” Knowledge of Life. Trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. 121-133
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