What can we learn about the normal from the history of nineteenth-century science?

Rather than tracing the supposedly irresistible rise of the concept of the normal, this paper will show that throughout the nineteenth century the term had a remarkably constrained set of discursive functions. It was during the nineteenth century a quite specific term in medical discourse. The term first appeared in 1818 in a treatise on comparative anatomy, and was used there to speak about the fact that certain parts of the anatomy, dubbed “normal organs,” had a stable, well integrated, non-dominant set of functions. After 1830, in the language of physiology, the term “normal state” came to displace older expressions such as “the state of (perfect) health.” When the concept of the normal was used in the scientific description of bodies, it referred to the “regular” or the “ordinary.” In anatomy and physiology, it was not opposed to the abnormal. Some teratologists, while committed to the description of anomalies, explicitly rejected the notion that anomalies of various kinds might be aggregated into a general condition of abnormality. So it was not in fact the case that the normal and the abnormal developed from the outset as a binary pair. Furthermore, anthropologists in the Italian school of criminal anthropology after 1875 spoke of dangerous individuals – criminals and insane people – without ever using the term “abnormal.” This paper will attempt to understand in retrospect how it was possible to think about the normal without entering automatically into binary thinking.  [This paper co-presented with Dr Elizabeth Stephens, Souther Cross University, Australia; elizabeth.stephens@scu.edu.au.]