Article ID: CBB000831760

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

unapi

Boury, Dominique (Author)


Science in Context
Volume: 21
Pages: 521--535
Publication date: 2008
Language: English


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

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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Authors & Contributors
Wolfe, Charles T.
Alfonso-Goldfarb, Ana Maria
Amaral, Maria Thereza Cera Galvão do
Boschung, Urs
Carvallo, Sarah
Cheung, Tobias
Journals
Science in Context
Gesnerus
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Korean Journal of Medical History
Revue d'Histoire des Sciences
Publishers
Rodopi
UNICAMP, Centro de Lógica, Epistemologia e História da Ciência
McGill University (Canada)
Concepts
Vitalism
Physiology
Medicine
Senses and sensation; perception
Muscles
Experimental biology
People
Haller, Albrecht von
Stahl, Georg Ernst
Barthez, Paul Joseph
Bernard, Claude
Bordeu, Théophile de
Sherrington, Charles Scott
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
16th century
20th century
Enlightenment
Modern
Places
France
Institutions
Université de Montpellier
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