Writings on Medicine - (Forms of Living) by Georges Canguilhem (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 organism's self-regulation, and medical metaphors linking the organism to society.

Writings on Medicine is at once an excellent introduction to Canguilhem's 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.

Review Quotes

Georges Canguilhem's Writings on Medicine, translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers (and published by Fordham University Press), is a short book that every dean of every medical school and every school of public health should consider as required reading for their students. The book might also prompt serious discussions among those of us long past our student days... It is the very best introduction available to Canguilhem's ideas--ideas that remain coordinates for navigating some of the most troubling questions in contemporary medicine.-- "--Richard Horton, The Lancet"

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.-- "--Tijdschrift voor Filosofie"

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 works of the French philosopher, whose influence on major contemporary thinkers and social scientists is increasingly acknowledged.-----Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Thanks to the translation and careful introduction by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, this precious posthumoulsy edited collection of essays by Georges Canguilhem is now accessible to the English reader. Canguilhem's late writings on medicine form an important complement to his works on the history and epistemology of the life sciences as assembled in his Etudes and in his late work on Rationality and Ideology in the Life Sciences.-----Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

About the Author

Georges Canguilhem (Author)
Trained in philosophy and medicine, Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) remains one of France's most influential philosophers of science.

Stefanos Geroulanos (Translator)
Stefanos Geroulanos is Assistant Professor of Modern European Intellectual History at New York University. He is the author of An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought and the co-translator of Georges Canguilhem's Knowledge of Life (Fordham).

Todd Meyers (Translator)
Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University-Shanghai. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy.