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  • Normality: A Critical Genealogy by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens
  • Chiara Beccalossi
Normality: A Critical Genealogy. By Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 464 pp. $35.00).

In contemporary Western culture the term "normal" is an everyday word, the meaning of which is so obvious to one and all that it does not need be defined. It does not matter whether we think of the category of normality as a positive state or a set of oppressive social standards; we all know what normal means when we go to the doctor and they say that, for example, the level of haemoglobin in our blood test is normal, or when a psychologist says that our reaction is normal. In their book, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens show that the history of the idea of the "normal," as we know it today, is surprisingly short. The term "normal" only emerged in the mid-eighteenth century when it appeared in geometry and was used to refer to a perpendicular line, but it began to be used more routinely in scientific debates at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Through a series of interesting case studies drawn from a wide range of fields such as anatomy, statistics, physiology, criminal anthropology, anthropometrics, sexology, psychoanalysis and eugenics, Cryle and Stephens have devised an intellectual and cultural history that spans more than two centuries and considers scientific debates in France, Italy, Germany, Britain and the US. Among the major thinkers surveyed here are the zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, with his studies on anatomical abnormality in humans and animals; the statistician Adolphe Quetelet, who explored the "average man"; the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, who looked for bodily signs to identify the abnormal man; the eugenicist Francis Galton, who studied a mathematical model of heredity so governments could develop normalization programs; and sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who defined sexual perversions, and Alfred Kinsey, who investigated the "normal" sexual practices of North American men and women.

The authors show that the concept of normal was debated in the pages of scholarly journals and in learned societies such as the Académie de Medicine and the Academie des Sciences in the first half of the nineteenth century. It began to appear in Anglophone and European dictionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century, although it only featured occasionally in the pages of literary texts influenced by medical and scientific writings. Still, at the turn of the century, "normal" was a specialist term mainly employed in medical discourses, referring either to the normal state understood as a condition of health [End Page 873] and functionality, or to the normal anatomy as a healthy composition and disposition of the organs.

At the end of the nineteenth century the term "normal" was increasingly used and acquired centrality in the specialised literature on nervous diseases. It began to be employed in a diverse range of fields, most of which were medical in approach, including psychology, psychiatry, sexology and psychoanalysis, public health and marital advice literature. In these disciplines the idea of the normal came to play a prominent role and doctors started to refer to the "normal," especially when writing about human sexuality. Outside science there was no popular concept of the normal, nor any general category of normality, until the twentieth century. Indeed the word "normal" acquired cultural authority and became familiar to people beyond scientific circles only in the second half of the twentieth century.

The authors convincingly argue that the category of normality has expanded and gained credence because of the slippage between the quantitative idea of the normal (the average) and the qualitative one (the ideal and perfect type that does not exist in real life). They take Georges Canguilhem's philosophical history, Le Normal et le pathologique (1943) and Michel Foucault's insights into the practices of normalization as points of departure for their analysis, engaging with these French thinkers throughout the book in order to redefine and sharpen their analysis, albeit diverging on some critical points. For example, Cryle and Stephens argue that the emergence of the concept of normality was not, as Foucault claims, within the large disciplinary...

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