Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens. Normality

“The normal is not monolithic,” write Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (p.359). Normality: A Critical Genealogy is an ambitious, wide-ranging study that demonstrates this crucial point, adding helpful specificity and historicity to our understanding of the normal and its cultural power. Tracing the genealogy of both the term and the concept from about the 1820s to the 1950s, Cryle and Stephens pay particular attention to the ways in which the normal wove in and out of attendant notions such as the average, the typical, the healthy, and the ideal, in fields as varied as anatomy, medicine, statistics, anthropology, and human sexuality. The normal, they conclude, was constantly debated, marked by persistent instability even as it gained popular traction in the twentieth century. The term “normal” made its first appearance in mid-eighteenth century geometry, where it referred to a perpendicular line. By the 1820s, the word had migrated into comparative anatomy, where Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire employed it to mean a propensity to organizational stability; as organs achieved a full degree of development, they evinced robust natural laws that left no need for an opposing concept of “abnormality.” Cryle and Stephens engage explicitly with the work of Georges Canguilhem, qualifying his focus on binary logic as they detail debates in French anatomy and physiology. The authors also emphasize the coexistence of quantitative and qualitative thinking in the history of normality, a tension that would continue into the twentieth century.

Epistemology · Genealogy · Normality · Power (physics) · Sociology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · Neurology and Historical Studies · Philosophy · Psychology