Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery by Camille Nurka

Author:Camille Nurka
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319964904
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Approaching Normality

Jayle’s concept of normality was envisaged as a perfect and truthful mathematical average, and it was indebted to the concept of the ‘average man’ developed by the influential nineteenth-century Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). In Quetelet’s method, an average type could be deduced from a large pool of measurements by calculating clustering and divergence. By eliminating extreme divergences or individual variations from the calculation of a sufficient number of people, the statistician could isolate that which was the most common among the most people. 30 As Quetelet expressed it, ‘those who are closest to the average are greatest in number; those who are furthest away from it are fewest in number’. 31 Those considered to be on the extreme outer edges had to be excluded from the measurable field; they therefore set the limit for any calculation of the perfect average. Quetelet held that the truth lay between extremes or limits ‘defined by nature’, which meant that the average had to be a product of real populations (rather than, say, an artist’s imagination), which were bounded by historical and geographical limits. The average was not supposed to be an abstract universal, but a calculation based on real living populations that, as Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens explain, ‘pointed to an ontological reality’. 32 Nevertheless, as a distillation of difference resolved into a single figure, the average man represented a certain kind of ideal purity, with qualities ‘developed in due proportion, in perfect harmony, alike removed from excess or defect of every kind, so that, in the circumstances in which he is found, he should be considered as the type of all which is beautiful—of all which is good’. 33

As far as medicine was concerned, Quetelet’s average man could be considered to be a ‘perfect’ type, ‘and everything differing from his proportions … would constitute deformity and disease; every thing found dissimilar, not only as regarded proportion and form, but as exceeding the observed limits, would constitute a monstrosity’. 34 As Cryle and Stephens have observed, Quetelet was convinced of the utility of statistics for the medical sciences, against the backdrop of opposition from doctors who insisted that patients could not be averaged; doctors felt that they treated patients in their specificity based on their professional expertise and judgement. 35 Nevertheless, Cryle and Stephens argue, Quetelet’s theory of the ‘average man’ was significant for its intervention in the medical field and the novel way it conjoined the ‘average’ and the ‘normal’ in the figure of the patient. 36 The physician was already working with a conception of the average man, Quetelet argued, because illness always presented itself to the physician as a deviation from a ‘normal state’. The doctor needed a concept of what was normal, or average, to know what was pathological. 37 Quetelet stated that ‘in order to recognise whatever is an anomaly, it is essentially necessary to have established the type constituting the normal or healthy condition’. 38

Quetelet’s influence on Jayle is apparent in the latter’s quest to divine the qualities of perfectly proportioned body.

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