Of Two Lives One? Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud and the Question of Holism in Vitalist Medicine (2008)
Williams, Elizabeth A. (Author)
Science in Context
Volume: 21
Pages: 593--613
Publication date: 2008
Language: English
Edition Details: Part of a special issue on “Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment”
Montpellier vitalists upheld a medical perspective akin to modern holism in positing the functional unity of creatures imbued with life. While early vitalists focused on the human organism, Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud investigated digestion, growth, and other physiological processes that human beings shared with simpler organisms. Eschewing modern investigative methods, Grimaud promoted a medically-grounded metaphysics. His influential doctrine of the two lives broke with Montpellier holism, classifying some vital phenomena as higher and others as lower and attributing the nobility of the human species to the predominance of the former. In place of Montpellier teaching that attributed health to the holistic equilibration of vital activities, Grimaud embraced spiritualist dualisms of soul and body, Creator and created. Celebrating the divinely-ordained wisdom evident in involuntary physiological processes, he argued that such life functions were incomprehensible to human investigators. While Grimaud's work encouraged inquiry into the division between the central and vegetative nervous systems that became paradigmatic in nineteenth-century neuroscience, it also opened Montpellier vitalism to charges of conservatism and obscurantism that are still lodged against it to the present day.
...MoreArticle Wolfe, Charles T. (2008) Introduction: Vitalism without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment. Science in Context (p. 461).
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