In the chapter “Implications of a Theory” in The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem assesses the implications of Claude Bernard’s concept of the normal, and how, from a physiological point of view, it can be distinguished from the pathological. After examining Bernard’s theory, he concludes that a purely quantitative understanding of the difference between the normal and the pathological fails to capture the essence of what makes a particular state a disease. Therefore, the experimental method championed by Bernard may have certain scientific advantages, but it enables neither the researcher nor the physician to conceptualise his or her object of study. Diseases cannot be understood as purely quantitative facts; they require an understanding of life’s normativity, which gives rise to clinical practices and technologies in which experiences with patients are made and from which experimental research questions arise (Méthot 2013). In Canguilhem’s words, “quantitatively different results would have no quality, no value in a laboratory, if the laboratory had no relationship with a hospital or clinic […]” (1991, 111 [1966]). Concepts of disease, thus, are intimately tied to the experiences structured by the health care system and, ultimately, to a lived life and, as complex phenomena, they cannot be grasped in their entirety without a reference to the lives they affect.
As Canguilhem rightly claimed: “What is a symptom without context or background? What is a complication separated from what it complicates…