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Article ID: CBB000831760

Irritability and Sensibility: Key Concepts in Assessing the Medical Doctrines of Haller and Bordeu (2008)

Science in Context
Volume: 21
Pages: 521--535

Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Part of a special issue on “Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment”
Language: English

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Vitalism Muscles Experimental biology Senses and sensation; perception Physiology Epistemology Medicine 18th century Menuret de Chambaud, Jean Jacques Haller, Albrecht von Bordeu, Théophile de Université de Montpellier

This article addresses the doctrinal controversy over the various characterizations of irritability and sensibility. In the middle of the eighteenth century, this scientific debate involved some encyclopaedist physicians, Albrecht von Haller (1709--1777), Jean-Jacques Ménuret de Chambaud (1733--1815), and Théophile de Bordeu (1722--1776). The doctor from Bern described irritability as an experimental property of the muscle fibers and made it the basis of a neo-mechanism in which organic reactions are related to the degree of irritation of the fibers. The practitioners from Montpellier considered sensibility, a property of living matter, to be a spontaneous activity of the organ and developed around this notion an original conception of the organism as the sum of the specific lives of each part. Beyond conceptual divergences, two ways of thinking whose philosophical presuppositions (conception of living matter, mechanism, and organicism), were in opposition, while their epistemological principles (experience versus observation) and their medical practices (active medicine and expectant medicine) went on to evolve in different directions. The privileged place granted to experimentation and assessment enabled physiology to be articulated as an autonomous scientific discipline; the pre-eminence of observation and attention to the radical specificity of the living being constituted the bases of clinical medicine.

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Article Wolfe, Charles T. (2008) Introduction: Vitalism without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment. Science in Context (p. 461). unapi

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