| Description |
1 online resource (440 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
The normal in nineteenth-century scientific thought -- The "normal state" in French anatomical and physiological discourse of the 1820s and 1830s -- "Counting" in the French medical academy during the 1830s -- Rethinking medical statistics: distribution, deviation and type, 1840-1880 -- Measuring bodies and identifying racial types: physical anthropology, c.1860-1880 -- The dangerous person as a type: criminal anthropology, c. 1880-1900 -- Anthropometrics and the normal in Francis Galton's anthropological, statistical, and eugenic research, c.1870-1910 -- The dissemination of the normal in twentieth-century culture -- Sex and the normal person: sexology, psychoanalysis, and sexual hygiene literature, 1870-1930 -- The object of normality: composite statues of the statistically average American man and woman, 1890-1945 -- Sex and statistics: the end of normality |
| Summary |
The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in this fields must first have a better understanding of the context of normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does - and doesn't - mean to be normal. -- from back cover |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from PDF title page (Proquest Ebook Central, viewed May 16, 2019) |
| Subject |
Norm (Philosophy) -- History
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Social sciences -- Europe, Western -- History -- 20th century
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Social sciences -- Europe, Western -- History -- 19th century
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Social sciences -- United States -- History -- 20th century
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Social sciences -- United States -- History -- 19th century
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Medicine -- France -- History -- 19th century
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Medicine -- Philosophy.
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Social sciences.
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Philosophy, Medical
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Social Sciences
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Medicine
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social sciences.
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71.01 history of sociology.
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PSYCHOLOGY -- Social Psychology.
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Philosophy.
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Medicine -- Philosophy
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Medicine
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Norm (Philosophy)
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Medizin
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Social sciences
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Sozialwissenschaften
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Soziale Norm
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History.
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Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge.
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Philosophy.
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| SUBJECT |
Europe. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85045631
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France |
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Europe |
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United States |
| Subject |
Europe
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Western Europe
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France
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United States
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Frankreich
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USA
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| Genre/Form |
History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| Author |
Stephens, Elizabeth, 1969- author.
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| LC no. |
2016051200 |
| ISBN |
9780226484198 |
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022648419X |
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