“Is it normal Doctor?” The normal and the pathological in first-line medicine

 The article examines the process of normalization which operates within first-line medicine from a triple corpus of data anchored on more than 800 articles of the journal Prescrire, a series of interviews with practising physicians (N=20) and in situ observation sessions in their offices (N = 100h). The ambition goes beyond just the framework of a sociography of practices of cure to consider the normative context that seeks to regulate the production of the pathos that bears a medical label. Thus studied through the prism of norms conveyed in the journal Prescrire, the physician/patient relation-ships implemented in the offices of these professionals are concerned in the manufacture of “abnormal”, in the same way as the rationalities conveyed in the accounts of these caregivers. The article then shows the central place that first-line medicine occupies within this process, in the face of the contemporary obsession with normality, which covers both the collective elaboration of individual behaviors deemed to be non-compliant with a state of health considered as pathological, and the socio-medical project of the “correct”. Would then reporting biological deviance be enough to generate social deviance?