Georges Canguilhem. Introduction by Michel Foucault. 
 
Zone Books: 1989. First Zone edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Trace soiling on one of the last leaves. 327 pages. Near fine.
 
There are no other Zone first editions of this book on the market, a Nietzschean masterwork of scholarship in the history of science. Canguilhem shows that the changing relationship of health and disease is not the picture of a march towards objective truth but a mutable series reflecting the demands of institutional power. Those interested in biology and physiology will take special notice, since the book sets its gaze on these sciences and how their objects of study resist quantification and formalization. Foucault's introduction draws lines of Canguilhem's influence through every serious French intellectual camp engaging with the mystery of the subject.
 
"A norm, or a rule, is what can be used to right, to square, to straighten."