Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0942299590, Paperback)

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.