Normality

In contemporary Western culture the term “normal” is an everyday word, the meaning of which is so obvious to one and all that it does not need be defined. It does not matter whether we think of the category of normality as a positive state or a set of oppressive social standards; we all know what normal means when we go to the doctor and they say that, for example, the level of haemoglobin in our blood test is normal, or when a psychologist says that our reaction is normal. In their book, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens show that the history of the idea of the “normal,” as we know it today, is surprisingly short. The term “normal” only emerged in the mid-eighteenth century when it appeared in geometry and was used to refer to a perpendicular line, but it began to be used more routinely in scientific debates at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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