Emphasis on cutting edge science is common today. This paper shows that the concept, which selects some science at any given time as epistemically preferable and therefore better, actually gained acceptance by the turn of this century in biology and began immediately to have consequences for what biological research was done. The result, that some research is cut out while other work is privileged, can have pernicious results. Some of what is designated as not cutting edge may, in a different (...) — and equally defensible epistemological framework, prove just as good as the officially cutting edge research. Cutting edges cut both ways, and those who study science should begin exploring the implications of that fact. (shrink)

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) rank as two of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. Renowned for their experiments, lectures, and writing, Bernard and du Bois-Reymond earned great prestige as professors of physiology in a time when Paris and Berlin reigned as capitals of science. Yet even though they were equals in every way, du Bois-Reymond’s reputation has fallen far more than Bernard’s. This essay compares aspects of the two men’s attitudes to philosophy, history, and (...) biology in an attempt to explain why Bernard remains the better known. The answer lies less in the value of du Bois-Reymond’s contributions than in the way that science is remembered in France and Germany. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring to light the importance of the notion of économie animale in Montpellier vitalism, as a hybrid concept which brings together the structural and functional dimensions of the living body – dimensions which hitherto had primarily been studied according to a mechanistic model, or were discussed within the framework of Stahlian animism. The celebrated image of the bee-swarm expresses this structural-functional understanding of living bodies quite well: “One sees them press against each other, (...) mutually supporting each other, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part, in its own way, by means of the correspondence and directions of its motions, enables this kind of life to be sustained in the body” (Encyclopédie, article “Observation,” by Ménuret de Chambaud). What is important here is that every component part is always a living part, i.e., every structural unit is always functional. Interestingly, while the twin notions of ‘animal economy’ and organisation are presented as improvements over a mechanistic perspective, they are nonetheless compatible with an expanded sense of mechanism and by extension, with materialism as reflected notably in the writings of Ménuret and Bordeu. We thus propose both a revision and reconstruction of the historical status of the ‘animal economy’, and a reflection on its conceptual status. (shrink)

In Expériences sur le principe de la vie (Chez D’Hautel, Paris, 1812), Jean César Legallois, a French physician and physiologist, explored the basic regulatory framework of vital processes of warm-blooded animals. He decapitated rabbits and cut off their limbs in order to search for a seat of life that is located in the spinal cord. Through ligatures and artificial pulmonary insufflations, he kept the trunks of rabbits alive for some minutes. Legallois thus criticized models of organic order in which the (...) spinal cord only mediates, like a gross nerve, between the brain and the body. He identified a certain section of the spinal cord that influences respiratory acts, and he also established a connection between the spinal cord and the movement of the heart. Further on, Legallois envisioned experiments that would extend the life-time of headless trunks through the infusion of arterial blood. (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to understand the origin of experimental and scientific models of pathogeny of the diseases of the nervous system in the Salpêtrière (Paris). I will analyse the role of the contexts of cell theory, microscopy and the advances in histological techniques in the creation of various pathogenic models, based on the concept of the cell, the Wallerian degeneration and the neurone concept. I argue that, as medicine and pathology remain autonomous in their methods and goals, (...) because of the evident degree of complexity of diseases, close and reciprocal interactions with sciences, their practices and theories, make it possible to establish convergences between clinical observations, pathological data and those from the experimental models of pathologies. The search for pathogenic models behaves like an engine, which is efficient in assembling facts, in testing pathogeneses and reforming nosologies, combined with the breakthroughs in biology. This paper is a case study showing the emergence of such interactions in the last decades of the nineteenth-century in Paris. (shrink)