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LIT-817: On the Normal and the Pathological

2 min read

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StatusUnavailable — registered 2026-10-07 from metadata and secondary accounts, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex and Unpaywall report the English edition closed. SpringerLink (link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-009-9853-7) serves the front matter and the two section title pages free; the seventeen chapters are subscription content. The front matter was read: the table of contents (which confirms the chapter list in the body), the translators' note (the translation follows the 1972 PUF edition) and Michel Foucault's introduction (pp. ix–xx). Foucault's introduction is an essay on Canguilhem as a philosopher of error and concept, not a summary of the book's argument, so no NOTE is filed from it. It does not state what CLAIM-018 cites it for, health as a capacity to institute new norms. The French editions are in copyright, and no author-sanctioned copy was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied.
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Tagsphilosophy-of-biology, philosophy-of-science

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Georges Canguilhem (1943; expanded 1966), On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett with Robert S. Cohen, introduction by Michel Foucault, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978; reissued as The Normal and the Pathological, New York: Zone Books, 1989 — DOI-10.1007/978-94-009-9853-7

Key takeaways

Registered from secondary description, not read. What follows comes from Crossref’s chapter list for the English edition and from standard accounts of the book.

  • Two essays. The 1943 essay asks whether the pathological state is only a quantitative modification of the normal state (Comte’s “Broussais’s principle”, Claude Bernard, René Leriche), and whether there are sciences of the normal and the pathological (“Norm and Average”, “Disease, Cure, Health”, “Physiology and Pathology”). The 1963–66 reflections (“From the Social to the Vital”, “On Organic Norms in Man”, “A New Concept in Pathology: Error”) extend it to social norms.
  • The normal is normative. Its best-known claim is that health is not conformity to a fixed norm or an average, but the capacity to tolerate infractions of the usual norm and to institute new norms in new situations; disease is life under narrowed norms, not the absence of norms.
  • History of concepts. It argues that the categories of normal and pathological, as nineteenth-century physiology and medicine defined them, were less objective than they appeared.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-07 at the owner’s request. The owner’s essay “The Organization of Will” uses it interpretively, for health as a norm-changing capacity.

Unavailable because no lawful full text was reached on 2026-10-14 (see the status note). The entry is written from metadata and secondary description, not from the book. The free front matter on SpringerLink was read: its table of contents matches the two essays as listed above, and Foucault’s introduction reads Canguilhem as a philosopher of “error, concept, and the living being”. Neither states the norm-instituting account of health that CLAIM-018 cites the book for.

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