Medicine does not originate with the concept of disease, but with that of actual and potential biological or psychological negativities, suffering, discomfort, and harm. Medical norms are thus intrinsically negative. This chapter introduces a kind of shuttling back and forth between a first position, a syntactic stance for which abnormal conditions are foundational so that physiology is a default, and a second position, a semantic stance, at the clinical level for which physiology is conceptually prior to pathophysiology and diseases are altered states. The need for intervention is constitutive of those medically negative, i.e. pathologic features.