Writings on Medicine [Paperback]

At the time of his death in 1995, Georges Canguilhem was a highly respected historian of science and medicine, whose engagement with questions of normality, the ideologization of scientific thought, and the conceptual history of biology had marked the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze.

This collection of short, incisive, and highly accessible essays on the major concepts of modern medicine shows Canguilhem at the peak of his use of historical practice for philosophical engagement. In order to elaborate a philosophy of medicine, Canguilhem examines paramount problems such as the definition and uses of health, the decline of the Hippocratic understanding of nature, the experience of disease, the limits of psychology in medicine, myths and realities of therapeutic practices, the difference between cure and healing, the organisms self-regulation, and medical metaphors linking the organism to society.

Writings on Medicine is at once an excellent introduction to Canguilhems work and a forceful, insightful, and accessible engagement with elemental concepts in medicine. The book is certain to leave its imprint on anthropology, history, philosophy, bioethics, and the social studies of medicine.

Such a collection will undoubtedly further Canguilhem scholarship and provide valuable contributions to various contemporary debates within the life sciences, from the relation between evolution and medicine, and the significance of the doctor-patient relation, to the very nature of health and disease.Celebrated as historian of the life sciences and epistemologist of the normal and the pathological, Georges Canguilhem, in this series of little known essays, proves also to be a critical observer of medicine and a reflexive analyst of the concept of health. One should be grateful to Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers for continuing their systematic translation of the often dispersed but coherent worls.