A healthy patient

Health is a crossroads concept that allows man to read the world and understand himself as a biological subject. This is one of the reasons why today's society considers health to be an essential dimension of human well-being. A large majority of people conceive that health, like illness, has the singularity of suggesting that it is a given state or thing, that is, an objective reality. It is therefore tempting to place health on the side of the norm (normality) and illness on the side of its opposite, i.e. the pathological. As a result, health appears to be a stable and almost perfect state of equilibrium that is altered as soon as the body is affected by any pathology. Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) rightly points out that health is not a "normal state" but a capacity for individual adaptation to environmental variations. Health is not an impeccable state, a perfect order devoid of variations. For him, health is simultaneously an actual adaptation and a potential adaptation. It is a "biological normativity" that oscillates between the normal and the pathological.