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References
William Coleman cites both vivisectional and physicochemical approaches in his Biology in the Nineteenth Century (New York: John Wiley, 1971), observing that a general conception of life and organism “commonly determined or, at the very least, offered essential premises for the determination” of a physiologist's choice of method. More specifically, F. L. Holmes describes the physicochemical approach in “Elementary Analysis and the Origins of Physiological Chemistry,” Isis, 54 (1963), 50–81. Relatedly, Everett Mendelsohn argues that the role of physical and chemical theories in physiology was more important than vitalism or mechanism in characterizing physiological research, in “Physical Models and Physiological Concepts: Explanation in Nineteenth Century Biology,” Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 2 (1965), 201–219. Karl Rothschuh's pioneering Geschichte der physiologie (Berlin: Springer, 1953) and, more specifically, J. M. D. Olmsted's François Magendie (New York: Schumans, 1944) and M. D. Grmek's “François Magendie,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), IX, 6–11, emphasize the use of vivisectional methods. V. S. Kruta puts J. J. C. Legallois first in the series of French experimentalists but likewise sees in that method a crucial transition from observation and speculation, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, VIII (1973) 132–135. Joseph Schiller likewise emphasizes experiment, but in relationship with a uniquely physiological concept of function in “Physiology's Struggle for Independence,” Hist. Sci. 7 (1968), 64–87, and Claude Bernard et les problèmes scientifiques de son temps (Paris: Editions du Cèdre, 1967). Denying that methodology was the source of novelty, W. R. Albury also emphasizes the development of a uniquely physiological concept of function which in turn required an experimental approach, in “Physiological Explanation in Magendie's Manifesto of 1809,” Bull. Hist. Med., 48 (1974), 90–99, and “Experiment and Explanation in the Physiology of Bichat and Magendie,” Studies in History of Biology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), I, 47–131. While Albury supports the conclusion stated here on the importance of Georges Cuvier in the reformulation of physiological thought, a remark by Georges Canguilhem suggests difficulties with the notion that functional thinking was new to physiological reasoning: he notes that Harvey, Haller, and Lavoisier all introduced considerations other than those based on anatomical deduction. See his “La constitution de la physiologie comme science,” in Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris, 1968), pp. 226–273. The expectation that a concern with function per se probably underlies every major change in physiological theory underlies this study.
AlbrechtvonHaller, “On the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals” (1753), Bull. Hist. Med., 4 (1936), 659.
Many of these themes are explicated more fully, although for the different purpose of assessing Bichat's debt to Montepellier thought and to R. Whytt, in Elizabeth Haigh's “The Roots of the Vitalism of Xavier Bichat,” Bull. Hist. Med., 49 (1975), 72–86, and her “Vitalism, the Soul, and Sensibility: The Physiology of Théophile Bordeu,” J. Hist. Med., 31 (1976), 30–41. Also Albury summarizes the emphasis—in the theories of Barthez, Chaussier, Dumas, and Richerand—on the principles of sensibility and contractility, illustrating that these physiologists shared Bichat's views, in “Experiment and Explanation,” pp. 77–80.
Bichat endowed every organ, muscular or not, with some species of sensibility and contractility. The internal viscera, for instance, exhibited wavelike, macroscopic motions of “organic contractility,” which he regarded as an effect of “organic sensibility” (Physiological Researches on Life and Death, with notes on the text by F. Magendie, trans. F. Gold [Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1827], p. 104). Richerand cited the observed contractions and undulations in a fluidfilled membrane in the body of a surgical patient as evidence of the existence of contractility in nonmuscular fibers. The observation “serves to prove, much better than all experiments made on living animals... what we ought to think of the pretensions of Haller and his followers on the insensibility and non-irritablity of serous membranes and other organs of analogous structure” (The Elements of Physiology, trans. R. Kerrison [Philadelphia: Hopkins & Earle, 1808], p. 7). Similarly, Barthez spoke of muscular motion in nonmuscular organs such as the Fallopian tubes in Nouveaux elemens de la science de l'homme (Montpellier: Martel, 1778), pp. 64–65. Cabanis anatomically conflated nerve and muscle fibers by describing the latter as a combination of nervous pulp and cellular tissues (Oeuvres completes [Paris: Bossange Freres, 1824], III, 66–67). Every part which acted-which meant every living fiber in the organism-did so because innervation made it sensible and contractile.
TheophileBordeu, Oeuvres (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 1818), II, 800–801.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 82. Likewise, Cabanis thought that the phenomena of the animal economy could be imputed to the same cause as volitional movement-sensibility-because sensibility is exercised in organisms lacking nerves and brain, such as polyps, and because the parts which Haller had declared insensible “can in certain ill states become susceptible of lively pains; from which it seems clearly to result that, in the ordinary state, their sensibility, suited to the nature of their functions, is only weaker” (Oeuvres, III, 113; cf. also p. 122.) Cabanis's comments suggest why physicians found reasonable such explanations involving sensibility: active functioning of a part could be compared to a mild inflammation. Richerand adopted a view like the one Cabanis had expressed, relying on local sensibility to explain, for instance, why the pyloric valve does not let food pass until the fibers of that valve sense that it has been “sufficiently elaborated.” They know. (Elements, p. 60.) Bordeu, speaking of digestion but manifestly meaning assimilation and growth, observed that “digestion reduces to a true extraction, to a true choice, and to a very real distinction of good from bad; and no doubt sensibility presides over this function” (Oeuvres, p. 940).
For instance, Barthez, in trying to explain secretion and assimilation, wrote (Nouveaux elemens, pp. 104–105), “it is necessary to relate to the immediate action of the vital principle on these fluids the intestine movements which cause the formation of each humor, and which fix the duration of specific fermentation” (also cf. pp. 43, 107).
Bichat, Physiological Researches, pp. 107–110.
Bichat figuratively threw up his hands: “Why do these organs establish relations so different between the organs and the substances that are foreign to them? Let us stop here; let us be contented with proving this fact by a great number of examples without trying to discover the cause. We could offer nothing but conjectures upon this subject”. The “great number” of examples constituted a survey of the names of the secretions produced by the different tissues; there were no further comments on the mechanism involved in their formation. See his Anatomie générale (Paris: Brosson et J. S. Chaudé, 1822), I, 85. While the French theorists may have differed with Haller in their under-standing of sensibility and contractility and of the nature of metabolic processes (which Haller explained with physicochemical models), they, like Haller, treated such processes summarily, and in passing. Haller had discussed metabolic processes only in interstices of his textbook in the essays “On Death”, “On Digestion” and “On the Cellular Tissue”. In Cabanis's work, the relevant passages appeared in memoirs entitled “Influence of the Ages on Ideas and on Moral Affections” and “First Determinations of Animal Sensibility”. Barthez included two or three relevant paragraphs in his 200-page treatise Nouveaux elemens de la science de l'homme (1788). Richerand's pertinent comments occur only on 3 out of some 300 pages of text.
C. L.Dumas, Principles de physiologie (Paris: Imprimiere du Crapelet, 1800–1803) III, 587–588.
And, not so incidentally, he was also employing such explanations to deny Haller's physicochemical models for such metabolic processes (ibid.): “Their functions depend neither upon the configuration of vessels which changes at every moment nor on any compromise action of surrounding parts, nor on any physical, mechanical, or chemical causes which have given rise to hypotheses of all sorts on the mechanism of secretions”.
Bichat, Anatomie, p. 82.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 111.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 116.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 86.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, pp. 127–129.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 120.
Bichat bluntly stated, ”life entails no necessary association with the brain, at least not directly,” and argued the position in detail (Bichat, Physiological Researches, pp. 318–334, esp. p. 327).
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 65.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 67.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 68.
J. J. C.Legallois, Experiments on the Principle of Life, trans. J. G. Nancrede and N. C. Nancrede (Philadelphia: M. Thomas, 1813) p. 24.
Legallois offered these observations in evidence (Experiments, p. 36): “The phenomena presented by the severed thigh of the frog are what are commonly called the phenomena of irritability. They are constantly observed for a longer or shorter time after death. Those observed in the decapitated frog belong to life and always suppose the existence of the principle that produces the power of feeling and moving. In short, there is such difference between those phenomena of irritability and of contractility-sensibility that we have reason to be surprised that they should have been confounded”. Such a contrast between irritability and contractility solved yet another interpretive problem. Having assumed that life in general “is produced by a certain impression of the arterial blood upon the brain and the spinal marrow” (p. 58), Legallois needed to clarify the observation that destroying a large part of the spinal cord—such as the lumbar region—caused immediate death of the animal although the heart continued to beat. The heart, he explained, was merely manifesting its inherent irritability, but it actually lacked the necessary power—which would be present in contractile pulsations—to impel the blood around the body (pp. 78, 110, 146–147). Legallois went to great lengths to persuade himself and his readers that the still-beating heart was no longer propelling blood through the vessels, and struggled to invent experimental criteria and methods for establishing that circulation had ceased in such instances. The implication of that struggle—that the concept itself was faulty—was pointed out by one of Legallois's few vocal critics, A. W. Philip, in An Experimental Inquiry into the Laws of the Vital Functions (London, 1817), Still, Philip only went Legallois one better by assigning life to the brain rather than the spine.
He also sustained Cuvier's opinion that the spinal cord (by distributing an agent through the nerves) restored the ability of muscles to contract (GeorgesCuvier, Rapport historique sur les progres des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'a ce jour [1808] [Paris: Verdière, 1828], pp. 214–215).
J. J. C.Legallois, Experiments on the Principle of Life, trans. J. G. Nancrede and N. C. Nancrede (Philadelphia: M. Thomas, 1813), p. 11.
“It is not at all by itself alone that the fiber is contracted”, he wrote, “but by the influence of nervous fibers which are always united to it. The change which contraction produces cannot occur without the cooperation of two substances; and it is still further necessary that it be occasioned each time by an external cause, by a stimulant. The will is one of these stimulants which has the particular character that its conductor is the nerve, and that it is the brain from which it comes, at least in animals of a superior order”. (Rapport historique, p. 213). In the absence of nervous action on muscle, he concurred with Legallois that the muscle independently exhibited irritability: the will “excites irritability in the manner of external agents, and without constituting it; for in apoplectic paralytics, irritability is conserved without the will having any control”. This comment would contradict that previous statement unless Cuvier assumed, with Legallois, that irritable contraction is qualitatively different from genuine contraction elicited by nervous stimulation.
Rapport historique,, p. 214.
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Rapport historique,, p. 218.
FrançoisMagendie, “Quelques idées générales sur les phénomènes particuliers aux corps vivants”, Bull. Sci. Med. Soc. Méd. d'Emulation, 4 (1809), 151–166. Texts cited refer to W. R. Albury's translation, appended to his “Bichat and Magendie”, pp. 109–115.
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 113.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid., p. 114.
Ibid.
See note 80, below.
FrançoisMagendie, “Examen de l'action de quelques vegetaux sur la moelle epiniere,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 1 (1809), 368.
Olmsted, Magendie, p. 100. See also M. D. Grmek, “François Magendie,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, IX (1974), 6–11, and M. P. Earles, “Earlier Theories on the Mode of Action of Drugs and Poisons,” Ann. Sci., 17 (1961), 97–110. The Académie report by Pinel et al., “Rapport du memoire de M. Magendie sur les organes d'absorption dans les mammiferes,” Acad. Sci. Proc. Verb., 5 (1813), 142–146, suggests that Vicq d'Azyr, a physician with important research interests in comparative anatomy, had thought veins may absorb.
Olmsted's biography of Magendie makes no mention of this second important point upon which he and Delille based their supposition.
Questioning Bichat's claim that vessels and inert tubes shared no analogy because the former are sensible, Magendie in 1822 predicted (Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 101n): “A great advance will unquestionably be made in physiology, when we shall arrive at a knowledge of the course of a fluid in a system of canals, which have the same physical conditions as the system of arterial and venous vessels.” Between 1828 and 1830, Magendie published a series of papers by Poiseuille: ”Recherches sur la force du coeur aortique,” Magendie, J. Physiol., 8 (1828), 272–306, and 9 (1829), 341–358; “Recherches sur l'action des arteres dans la circulation arterielle,” 9 (1829), 44–59; “Recherches sur les causes du mouvement du sang dans les veines,” 10 (1830), 277–295. Among others, Poiseuille published two major further papers on capillary circulation in the Memoires des Savans Étrangères of the Académie (7 [1841], 105–175), and the Comptes rendus (16 [1843], 60–72).
FrançoisMagendie, De l'influence de l'émétique sur l'homme et sur les animaux (Paris: Crochard, 1813).
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 118, locates the cause of vomiting in the fibers of the stomach itself, which “often assume such a susceptibility of contraction that the slightest contact produces the most violent motions in them.”
Olmsted says that this is not actually the case in François Magendie, p. 55.
Ibid., p. 54.
FrançoisMagendie, “Experiences sur les fonctions des racines des nerfs spinaux,” J. Physiol., 2 (1822), 276–279.
See Paul F. Cranefield's The Way In and the Way Out (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Futura, 1974) and Michael Gross, “Bell, Magendie, and the Spinal Roots,” Appendix 3 of “Function and Structure in Nineteenth Century French Physiology,” Ph. D. diss., Princeton University, 1974.
GeorgesCuvier, Leçons d'anatomie comparée (Paris, 1800–1805), II 110–112.
FrançoisMagendie, An Elementary Compendium of Physiology, trans. E. Milligan (Edinburg: John Carfrae, 1823), p. 81n.
GeorgesCuvier, Leçons d'anatomie comparée (Paris, 1800–1805), II, 105.
FrançoisMagendie, An Elementary Compendium of Physiology, trans. E. Milligan (Edinburg: John Carfrae, 1823), p. 108.
GeorgesCuvier, Leçons d'anatomie comparée (Paris, 1800–1805), II, 106.
FrançoisMagendie, An Elementary Compendium of Physiology, trans. E. Milligan (Edinburg: John Carfrae, 1823), p. 98.
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 48.
FrançoisMagendie, An Elementary Compendium of Physiology, trans. E. Milligan (Edinburg: John Carfrae, 1823), p. 115. Likewise, man's “natural wants” (e.g., food, water, sex) are “the most diversified of any animal,” Magendie asserts, “in proportion to his intelligence” (p. 117).
Bichat, Physiological Researches, p. 12n.
Ibid., p. 128n.
Ibid., p. 87n. Magendie was not by any means antiquantitative, however. In fact, he went on to recommend a study of the motion of fluids in a system of canals with the same physical conditions as the system of veins and arteries, in preference to “casting myself entirely in the field of hypotheses by supposing for the small vessels a sensibility or a contractility which evidently does not exist at all in the large” (p. 112n). According to Bichat, circulation in each organ was “withdrawn from the empire of the heart” and independently controlled in each organ by its local sensibility. If so, blood flow in the veins would depend on the state of the organ the blood passed through rather than on the impulsive force of the heartbeat and the elasticity of the vessels. Magendie's study of circulation had shown; however, that even in veins “the action of the heart still makes itself felt in modifying the course of the blood” (p. 116n). See also note 43, above.
Ibid., p. 82n. He made an analogous criticism of the role of local sensibility in salivation. Sensation can be aroused only by direct contact of the sensing part with the substances to which it responds, but salivation can occur merely upon the sight of food; so local sensibility in the salivary duct could scarcely be the cause of salivation.
If an irritating substance were injected into a section of artery tied off by ligatures, he claimed, no pain would occur until these were removed; then, once the irritating substance reached any “sensible part in the cerebrospinal system, we can easily conceive that the animal must experience pain” (ibid., p. 85n).
Ibid., pp. 57n, 69n (my italics).
Flourens may have been motivated partly at least by his dissatisfaction with growing confusion about the use of the terms “irritability”, “sensibility”, and “contractility” during the half-century since Haller had assigned sensibility to nerves and irritability to muscles. As he wrote (in his “Recherches physiques sur les propriétés et les fonctions du système nerveux dans les animaux vertébrés”, Arch. Gen. Med., 2 [1823]), during the intervening period, the distinction had blurred and the terms had multiplied: “The contractility of Bichat is the irritability of Haller; the elasticity of Haller is the irritability of Glisson; the contractility of Bichat and the irritability of Haller are only particular cases of the sensibility of Cabanis and of LeGallois” (p. 327). He found unacceptable the use of a single cause (sensibility) to explain the distinct phenomena of perceived and unperceived actions, as well as of movements commanded by the will. Thus he sought to return to Haller's unitary use of sensibility to explain “the distinct phenomena of sensation”, and to restore the independent use of the tern “irritability”, which had been conflated with “sensibility”. By 1830, besides his findings on the functions of the cerebrum and cerebellum, he gave greater precision to Legallois's localization in the medulla oblongata of the site controlling respiratory motions, thus affirming Legallois's arguments for the participation of Bichat's “animal” system in the so-called organic, or vegetative economy.
Although Robert Young describes this work fully in his Mind, Brain, and Adaption in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), he relies on Flourens's somewhat misleading restatement of his findings in the wake of Cuvier's suggested reforms in their expression and interpretation. Thus Young treats Flourens's psychology as a personal invention, whereas Flourens's original paper suggests reliance on Condillac's sensationalism and his later papers owe much to Cuvier's somewhat different ideas. Fluorens's early interest in sensationalist psychology is further suggested by the fact that Destutt de Tracy attended his 1821 course at the Athénée Médicale in Paris titled “The Physiological Theory of Sensations” and Flourens wrote to de Tracy that the latter's ideas had “awakened” some of his own. See G. Legee, “M. J. P. Flourens (1794–1867) et Destutt de Tracy (1954–1836), “Hist. Nat., 4 (1974) 95–98.
Further evidence for this association depended upon some psychological reasoning. Removal of both hemispheres left the animal, usually a pigeon, in a “perpetual sleep, and even deprived of the faculty of dreaming during this sleep ... it gave no sign of will”. It repeatedly thrust itself against some obstacle, whereas a normal animal would have soon turned aside. Placed on its back, it righted itself; it drank water put in its beak; it resisted efforts to open its beak; it beat its wings when disturbed; it excreted; “the least irritation disturbed and troubled it” (Flourens, “Recherches physiques”, pp. 351–352). By repeatedly hurling itself against some obstacle, it evidenced lack of judgment. It retained all organic functions, such as swallowing water, yet evidenced none of the functions based on sensation, according to Flourens, such as the will to repeat the sensation of tasting water. He supposed that these behaviors meant the animal had lost sensation, which he located in the cerebrum.
However, not until he read Magendie's results did he distinguish between sensible and contractile portions of the spinal cord or its nerve roots; initially he had associated the spine with irritability and had thought nerves were bifunctional.
This portion of his research almost drew him into a miniature priority controversy of his own with the Italian Luigi Rolando, who had been cutting up the cerebellum in the same way, but for a different reason: to show it functioned like a galvanic apparatus. See ErmannoManni, “Luigi Rolando, 1773–1831”, Exp. Neurol., 38 (1973), 1–5.
Flourens, “Recherches physiques”, p. 359.
PierreFlourens, Recherches experimentales sur les propriétés et les fonctions du système nerveux (Paris: Ballière 1942), p. 368.
Cuvier, Anatomie comparée, II, p. 93.
PierreFlourens, Recherches experimentales sur les propriétés et les fonctions du système nerveux (Paris: Ballière 1842), pp. 78–79.
For instance, one of Gall's faculties was the sense of localities. And if its hypothetical organ within the cerebrum were removed, Flourens declared in 1819, “relative to space there will be neither perception, nor memory, nor judgment” (PierreFlourens, review of F. J. Gall, Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux, Rev. Encyc., 5 [1819], 457–466).
Impressed then only with the animal's failure to express pain, he did not indicate whether the parts so removed eliminated a specific kind of sensation, as Gall's view would have suggested (ibid., p. 465).
Tenon et al., in their report on Gall's treatise on the properties and functions of the nervous system, Acad. Sci. Proc. Verb., 4 (1808), 49–62, expressed Cuvier's reservations. The commission reporting on Flourent's work, which Cuvier chaired, had objected that, while Flourens had indeed proved that ablation of the hemispheres abolished vision and hearing, he had not proved that the other senses were also injured. Flourens showed in new experiments that all senses were suddenly and totally abolished once the damage caused by ablation went too far. And as the wounded brain healed, all senses were recovered simultaneously, a fact which Flourens saw as an argument for the unitary, indissociable functioning of all faculties of an intact brain.
J. J. C.Legallois, Experiments on the Principle of Life, trans. J. G. Nancrede and N. C. Nancrede (Philadelphia: M. Thomas, 1813), pp. 287–288.
J. J. C.Legallois, Experiments on the Principle of Life, trans. J. G. Nancrede and N. C.Nancrede (Philadelphia: M. Thomas, 1813), pp. 293–294.
Pelletan et al., “Rapport du mémoire Mm. Delille et Magendie qui a pour titre ‘Examen des effets de l'upas antiar et de plusieurs substances émétiques’”, Acad. Sci. Proc. Verb., 4 (1809), 275–277.
P.Pinel et al., “Rapport du memoire de M. Magendie sur les organes d'absorption dans les mammifères”, Acad. Sci. Proc. Verb., 5 (1811), 142–146.
One reason that magendie's study of vomiting so pleased the commissioners was that it confirmed Legallois's work. The regarded it as “a particular and very remarkable application of that general truth demonstrated by M. Legallois, namely, that the seat of the nervous power (the brain and spinal cord) is the unique source of all the movements which occur in the living animal and that any part whatever can execute no movement without a particular and prior modification of the portion of this seat by which it is animated ... It is quite probable that most of the substances which have some effect on the animal economy act in this manner, which leads to entirely new views on the action of most medicaments and poisons”. See G.Cuvier et al., “Rapport sur le memoire de M. Magendie relatif au vomissement”, Acad. Sci. Proc. Verb., 5 (1813), 174–179.
The report continued, perhaps somewhat coyly, “The need for and the severity of analysis have changed ideas and perfected judgment, and one knows what institution has the right to glorify itself for having instilled this great movement and give this useful example. Nobody has been more faithful to these principles than M. Magendie. He has never presented himself before us without being surrounded by demonstrations and all the memoirs with which he has paid homage to the section consist in proofs and facts”. Magendie was further labeled an “able experimenter ... as judicious [as] an anatomist as [he was] severe [as an] experimenter”. Magendie apparently wanted the relationship to continue, for, the commission's report observed, he “has never offered to the section a tribute of his distinguished talents without having at the same time contracted to soon offer it another”.
Cuvier et al., “Rapport sur le memoire de M. Magendie relatif a l'action de l'émétique”, Acad. Sci. Proc. Verb., 5 (1813), 244–248.
Ibid.
Olmsted, Magendie, pp. 48–49.
V. Kruta observed this relatiohsip in his essay on Pierre Flourens in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons), VIII (1973), 132–135. Olmsted made a similar estimation in “Pierre Flourens,” in Science, Medicine, and History, ed E. A. Underwood (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), II, 290–302.
Acad. Sci. Proc., Verb. 6 (1819), 426.
Albury, “Bichat and Magendie,” pp. 58, 83–84, 118n47.
Albury clarifies and enriches Schiller's suggestion that physiology achieved its independence from anatomy via a concept of function which transcended the role of any single anatomical element or organ (see note 1, above). Still, it is striking that the bulk of the work on the localization of sensibility and contractility is best characterized by the most anatomically oriented of Magendie's categories for studying a function: “the study of the action of each organ in particular to evaluate its contribution to the function” (Elementary Compendium, p. 20). While Albury concurs that Cuvier's ideas were important, the alliance with Cuvier should suggest that liberation from anatomy might be too cryptic a way of describing the rejection of the methods and assumptions of pathological anatomy combined with the acceptance of the assumptions of comparative anatomy. Albury himself drops the important hint that, as a result of Cuvier's influence, “the directive idea of Magendie's experimentation was biological rather than anthropomorphic” (“Bichat and Magendie,” p. 125n324); he might as easily have said “zoological rather than medical.” For the coherence of the multifaceted attacks on local sensibility suggest that something more than experimental findings are defining the functions to be researched. That coherence follows from the rejection by physiologists of both the theoretical assumptions and the specific content of the pathological anatomists' local sensibility explanations, from their adoption instead of the assumptions of the comparative anatomists, and from their pursuit of those expeeiments suggested by such a reformulation.
Magendie, “Quelques idées,” p. 112.
J. B.deLamarck, Zoological Philosophy, trans. High Elliot (London: Macmillan, 1914). pp. 207, 226–229. Lamarck thought animals are irritable (i.e., they can move suddenly as a result of external of internal stimuli; p. 195), but not necessarily sensible (p. 53). He averred that only animals with a nervous system can sense, and further claimed that sensibility has nothing to do with the cause of either nutritional processes or irritable movements (p. 220), as any student of “organization from the simplest animal up to man” readily perceives (p. 11). Likewise, Duméril wrote in his Zoologie analytique (Paris: Allais, 1806), p. 2, that while all animals react to the contact of external bodies, only some — presumably those with nerves — sense.
The oyster was an example of an animal which lacked these faculties, he noted. See Buffon's Natural History General and Particular, trans. William Wood (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1818), II, 356.
ADaubenton, “Introduction à l'histoire naturelle,” Encyc. methodique. Histoire naturelle, I (Paris, 1782), xiii.
Writing in his Traité élémentaire d'histoire naturelle, (2nd ed. [Paris: Deterville, 1807], p. 57) that nutrition was the only process characteristic of both plant and animal life, Duméril noted too that only animals have sensibility and motility. Lamarck agreed that nutritive processes were fundamental because they were responsible jointly for organic form and function (Zoological Philosophy, p. 51). Buffon's “molécules organiques” were his attempt to explain the development and production of organic forms.
For decades, form was the standard basis for distinguishing living species from nonliving. Naturalists would refer to the development and maintenance of organic form in the former, as compared with the “accidental” formation and lack of organization of mineral crystals (i.e., their regularity and simplicity of structure). In the mid-eighteenth century, Buffon had distinguished minerals and living organisms in accordance with his emphasis on the nutrition, growth, reproduction, and development manifested by living bodies (in his Natural History, pp. 355–359). Thus, whereas plants and animals share “a species of animated organisation,” or specific organic structures, “minerals have nothing that approaches regular organs,” and lack “organization or the power of reproduction.” Daubenton took a similar tack. Minerals are not living because they lack organic form. Loss of the “conformation of their organs” is the natural cause of death in plants and animals, for they have lost thereby “the properties necessary for their functions.” (See his “Introduction à l'histoire naturelle,” p. xiii.)
By the action of caloric, Lamarck accounted for the phenomena Cuvier later attributed to vital force, suggesting, for instance, that caloric caused the “special tremor” involved in nourishing organic form through special kinds of chemical transformations. These chemical processes were analogous to fermentations, but opposite in their effect. They resulted in assimilation rather than decomposition. (See his Zoological Philosophy, pp. 184–186, 212, 214–215, 220). Cuvier and Lamarck also differed with regard to the cause of muscle contraction. For Cuvier (in his Rapport historique, p. 211), contraction should be referred to a vital force: “movements are not produced by mechanical tremors or quiverings at all,... there must be a constant productive source of force and movement.” For Lamarck, caloric caused the irritable shortening of muscle when the muscle was stimulated directly by mechanical means, while normal, powerful muscle contraction following stimulation of the nerves depended upon some component of the electric fluid distributed by the nervous system.
GeorgesCuvier, Rapport historique sur les progres des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'a ce jour [1808] [Paris: Verdière, 1828], pp. 187–188.
GeorgesCuvier, Rapport historique sur les progress des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'a ce jour [1808] [Paris: Verdière, 1828], p. 194.
GeorgesCuvier, Rapport historique sur les progres des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'a ce jour [1808] [Paris: Verdière, 1828], p. 218.
GeorgesCuvier, Rapport historique sur les progres des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'a ce jour [1808] [Paris: Verdière, 1828], p. 27.
Magendie, “Quelques idées,” p. 107.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 108.
Cuvier uses the term in his Rapport historique, p. 211, as does Magendie in “Quelques idées,” p. 108.
The full text reads (“Quelques idées,” p. 109): “After having recognized a particular force as the cause of the nutritive movement, rather than ardently giving themselves over to the search for the laws of this force — a search which would be, without exception, the most beautiful and most interesting subject of work which anyone could propose for himself-they wish instead to see, in some fashion, how each molecule animated by the vital force acts in order to produce this nutritive movement; and thus they gratuitously suppose that the vital force is manifested in each molecule of a living body by two properties; the first, sensibility (the faculty of feeling, that is to say, of experiencing a more or less profound impression which changes the natural and usual rhythm of vibratility, etc.); and the second, motility (the faculty of movement which consists in a continual tendency toward contraction or tightening, etc.)... I refer to works of physiology in order to examine how nutrition is explained by means of sensibility and motility. Whatever explanations may be given it will be admitted that nothing in it is founded upon observation. What positive knowledge, then, do we have concerning nutrition?”
Ibid., p. 113.
Ibid., pp. 111–112.
Ibid., p. 108.
Michael Gross, “Function and Structure,” chaps. 2 and 3.
Actually Lavoisier's own views were more flexible. See J. S.Fruton, Molecules and Life (New York: John Wiley, 1972), p. 264.
FrançoisMagendie, “Experiences pour servir à l'histoire de la transpiration pulmonaire,” Bull. Soc. Philomat., 2 (1811), 252.
Albury, “Bichat and Magendie,” p. 130n294.
Magendie, “Quelques idées”, p. 108.
Ibid., p. 110.
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid.
GeorgesCuvier, Rapport historique sur les progres des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'a ce jour [1808] [Paris: Verdière, 1828], p. 189.
He also accepted the general contrast between chemical inputs and outputs of plants and animals which had been developed by Lavoisier, Crell, de Saussure, Sennebier, Spallanzani, Vauquelin, and Hallé (ibid., pp. 189–193). He praised the new capacity of chemistry “to transform at its pleasure a host of immediate principles into one another” so that “these same animal and vegetable acids which also result from the concurrence of vital forces are formed at will” by the chemist (pp. 118–119).
Ibid., p. 189.
Ibid., pp. 193–194 (my emphasis).
Ibid., p. 240.
Ibid., p. 230–233.
Magendie, “Quelques idées”, p. 109.
GeorgesCuvier, Rapport historique sur les progres des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'a ce jour [1808] [Paris: Verdière, 1828], pp. 239–240.
Cited in Albury, “Bichat and Magendie”, p. 106.
FrançoisMagendie, An Elementary Compendium of Physiology, trans. E. Milligan (Edinburg: John Carfrae, 1823), p. 9.
FrançoisMagendie, An Elementary Compendium of Physiology, trans. E. Milligan (Edinburgh: John Carfrae, 1823), p. 80.
See Gross, “Function and Structure”, Appendix I; Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation, p. 94; and “Recent Discoveries on the Physiology of the Nervous System”, Edinburgh Med. Surg. J., 21 (1823), 142–143.
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Gross, M. The lessened locus of feelings: A transformation in French physiology in the early nineteenth century. J Hist Biol 12, 231–271 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00124193
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00124193