Abstract
The text draws attention to Canguilhem's prominent position in the philosophy of medicine and at the same time shows his originality in the concept of knowledge about the living. The emphasis is on the singularity of the individual, and the relationship between the type and individual.
The type as such is never realized, otherwise everything would be similar. This then distinguishes medical knowledge from "exact science".
Canguilhem thus tells us that the goal of cognition is not the discovery of general structures, but the search for a new configuration of the organism, enabling it to cope with unexpected perturbations in the world, i.e. the establishment of a new norm.