Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists

Rappel des principes doctrinaux de la constitution de l'homme énoncés par Hippocrate, démontrés par Barthez et développés par son école et application de ces vérités à la théorie des maladies / par M. le professeur Lordat,...

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Intentions didactiques qui préoccupaient le professeur Lordat, lorsqu'il faisait les quinze leçons réunies sous ce titre : Idée pittoresque de la physiologie humaine médicale enseignée à Montpellier

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(Université de Toulouse – Le Mirail) and

The study of L1 attrition is currently entering its third decade. However, after twenty years of diligent investigation resulting in numerous theoretical and empirical papers the questions on this topic still greatly outweigh the answers. Findings from individual studies seem to indicate that it cannot even be said with any certainty whether an L1 in which a certain level of proficiency has been reached can ever undergo significant attrition, let alone how or why it might. There are many reasons for this failure to arrive at a more integrated and explanatory framework. Some are theoretical, some methodological, and some are linked to communication or lack thereof between individual researchers. These were the problems that our conference, this volume, and subsequent work have been trying to address. A further problem is, of course, the extraordinary complexity and multi-facetedness of the phenomenon of language attrition. It is our belief, however, that this last issue cannot even begin to be tackled unless the first three have been solved. This chapter will attempt to identify and clarify these issues, in order to establish the starting ground from which the individual papers will proceed. The first section will give