Lived reality and the multiplicity of norms: a critical tribute to George Canguilhem

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Abstract
Canguilhem considered the lived reality of a disease that makes a person visit a doctor with clinical complaints as more important than the deviance that may be detected in the laboratory. He also insisted that doing medicine is a technique mobilized to improve life rather than an assemblage of neutral scientific facts. But these two ways of insisting on lived reality have different consequences. In line with the second, I present various ways in which clinical normality and laboratory normality are handled in current day medical practice. I consider where that leaves the first approach of setting standards. The multiplicity of normalities detected raises the question of how the various medical normalitiesrelate. For if they hang together coherently, medicine, by normalizing, might actively help to order the society of which it forms a part. But what if the various medical normalities contradict each other and inform different orders?

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