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  • Normality: A Critical Genealogy by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens
  • Todd Meyers
Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens. Normality: A Critical Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. vi + 440 pp. $35.00 (978-0-226-48405-1).

In the final passages of Georges Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological, he writes, "Undoubtedly it took the temerity of youth to believe oneself equal to the task of a study of medical philosophy on norms and the normal. The difficulty of such an undertaking makes one tremble."1 A slog through the morass of the normal and adjoining concepts is daunting, and even more so in the long shadow [End Page 467] that Canguilhem's study casts. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens endeavor to do precisely that, offering a critical genealogy of the concept told through a history that is at once material, institutional, subjective, and corporeal (p. 5). Canguilhem sought to make evident the otherwise unnoticed interdependence of the normal and the pathological in medical thought. Cryle and Stephens claim a different motivation: "As the title of our book indicates, this study was born out of impatience and yet produced by dint of persistent labor. We were worn out by the ubiquity of the normal, alienated by it casual self-assurance, sidelined by the manner in which it took its comfortable place in the middle of our lives" (p. 2). All the same, one trembles.

Normality traces the concept of the normal as it moves from the early nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century, not only in medical thought (anatomy, physiology, biology, in the hospital) but also in disciplines and arenas that may have taken cues from medicine but leave clinical priorities behind (viz., physical anthropology, eugenics, social hygiene, and studies of sex and sexuality). The story is chronological as much as genealogical, as the normal makes "its conceptual slide from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from norms to normativity" over time (p. 2). The effort here is twofold: to relate a history of ideas and actors who many readers will be familiar with (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Bichat, Broussais, Poisson, Quetelet, Galton, Lombroso) and interpreters of these sources (Canguilhem, Foucault, Desrosières) to show that forms of thought and practices are taken up in ways that are more contradictory than straightforward. There is dissatisfaction on the part of the authors with the existing reading of this history. Quantitative knowledge does not wholly usurp qualitative observation; counting and probability lead to a scramble for conceptual tools and instruments to produce evidence as much as providing the basis for stable categories and metrics (of types, capacities, and tendencies). This is the political and critical complexion of Cryle and Stephens's study; the normal is a messy concept right up to its modern formulation, and normality is itself anything but recuperative.

The last two chapters are where the slide from the descriptive to prescriptive, from norms to normativity, is most evident and results in some of the liveliest moments in the book. Cryle and Stephens write, "Becoming normal was a difficult business at the start of the twentieth century" (p. 288). Correct ways of being set forth in social hygiene campaigns, codified in the statistical and scientific conceptions of the normal that centered especially on sexual behavior and average bodies, began to lose some force by midcentury. Alfred Kinsey's study of sexual behavior, which explicitly sought to relieve normal sexual practices of morality, shows that even when the normal is exposed as malleable, it remains a site of contestation.

Normality is not light reading. Its chapters build a case for reconsidering moments in medical and statistical thinking that might otherwise appear resolved for historians or reflect a neat but misleading symmetry of advancing concepts. Despite their doggedness, I cannot help but think that Cryle and Stephens are opening a discussion rather than claiming the final word. I was, however, left wanting a conclusion that might extend this genealogical thread in tangible and important ways into contemporary concerns regarding evidence-based and [End Page 468] personalized medicine, disability, or LGBTQ rights––topics to which the authors are certainly attuned and toward which the book seems to be aimed...

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