Last Wednesday, I attended the GRF Magdala’s Rose Café about the normal vs. the pathological in French medical literature. At first, it sounded like an esoteric topic, but she immediately began breaking it down for us and it soon became clear to me that this topic is extremely  applicable to our lives, despite her focus being on 19th and 20th century literature. I realized that I have always accepted the idea of some arbitrary standard of normality in all aspects of my life without ever questioning why those standards were chosen or how they may be damaging to people who may deviate from what is perceived to be “normal.”

In my opinion, some of the most important and controversial topics we discussed were the idea of normal vs. healthy vs. pathological and whether it is necessary to even have some standard of normal. At the time, I was convinced that having some standard of normal was necessary for medical practitioners under our current system, because otherwise there could be no way to generalize medical practices for a large and diverse human population. Many people at the Café disagreed, saying that the idea of normal does more harm than good, and Magdala brought to our attention a book by Emile Zola that subverted the notion that being different from the norm precluded having a fulfilled life (the protagonist of the novel was a woman with a limp). Even now, I am still intrigued and undecided on these issues, but at the very least I still believe in the utility of having a standard of healthiness that is not necessarily enforced (so that those who do not prescribe to the standard are not ostracized) but at least allows doctors to have some notion of an individual who needs care versus an individual who is not suffering.