The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the 19th-century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early 19th-century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from being objective scientific concepts. He demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought.

喬治·康吉萊姆（1904—1995），法國思想傢，曾就讀於法國巴黎高等師範學院和斯特拉斯堡大學，獲醫學博士學位，，先後任教於多所中學和斯特拉斯堡大學、索邦大學。其主要研究領域是科學史和科學哲學（認識論）。主要著作有《正常與病態》、《生命的知識》、《17—18世紀反射觀念 的形成》、《從發展到19世紀的進化》、《科學史和科學哲學研究》、《生命科學史中的意識形態和理性》、《健康：普通概念，哲學問題》。康吉萊姆是法國當代思想的開創者之一，其思想和研究方法對阿爾都塞、福柯、德勒茲等人産生瞭重大影響。

李春，文學博士，暨南大學翻譯學院教師。主要研究領域為中國現代文學、中國翻譯史和翻譯理論、已齣版譯著《空間與政治》、《策蘭與海德格爾：一場懸而未決的對話（1951—1970）》。