A Summary of “The Normal and the Pathological”

In “The Normal and the Pathological,” Georges Canguilhem urges us to think deeper on the topic of defining health, or the ‘normal’, and disease, or the ‘pathological,’ and argues the difference between normal and abnormal human life. Canguilhem compares two things scientists label as pathological; daltonism, or rather color blindness, and malaria, an infectious disease, and questions if one would consider the two to be labeled as equals on a ‘pathological’ level. The point he is trying to make us think about here is that we tend to group a number of obviously different things under one singular definition or description. He says that too often scientists hold the laws of nature to be essentially constant and unchanging, and they use those laws to define what is ‘normal’ in human life. In essence, scientists seem to label these laws as the norm, so any variation or divergence from these laws is labeled as impure, defective, or abnormal. Yet this is contradictory to the fact that these laws’ reality is insured by their incessant properties, however, at the same instance they are proven experimentally by examples that are completely different from one another. Canguilhem goes on to argue that “nature has an ideal type for all things, this is certain; yet this type is never realized. If it were realized then there would be no individuals, and everyone would resemble one another.” To put it more simply, he is conveying that the thing that makes each person different is where the ‘secret’ or ‘key’ to medicine lies. However, from this we realize that while this theory holds the answer, it is also the obstacle, because each individual reacts differently to biology and experimental medicine. Canguilhem ends with his opinion that someone who is ‘pathological’ or mentally ill and does not fall into our definition of the ‘normal’ is not necessarily abnormal but just an “other” individual. He seemed to squeeze all of these ideas into one simple sentence; normal is “ a certain form of adaption to the real or to life, one that has no absolute meaning.”

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