208 Biographical Memoir of' M. Philippe Pineh 



it not less as a philosopher than as a physician, wrote on the 

 subject. This time his work spoke for him, and he obtained 

 the prize *. The physician Thouret, who had been one of his 

 judges, and was also one of the administrators of hospitals, re- 

 presented him to his colleagues as worthy of being called to put 

 in practice, in a public establishment, the sound and novel views 

 which he had disclosed in his essay, and, at the beginning of 

 1792, procured for him the office of physician to the Bicetre. In 

 1794, he had him transferred to La Salpetriere, and the follow- 

 ing year, when Thouret was commissioned, along with Fourcroy, 

 to organize the school of medicine, Pinel was one of the profes- 

 sors whom he nominated. 



Henceforward the progress of M. Pinel was as rapid as his 

 former endeavours had been vain -f. Applying, on a great 

 scale, his talent for observation and analysis, and giving in his 

 lectures, with an unusual degree of method, the results of the 

 observations which he had made in the hospitals, he soon drew^ 

 a crowded audience. His numerous pupils did for him what 

 his bashfulness had hindered him from doing for himself; and 

 now having, with singular rapidity, from being a man of science 

 who had been left to the seclusion of his chamber, become one 

 of the most esteemed physicians of the capital, he might have 

 remarked, that, if it may be said, with the proverb, the value of' 

 a situation is that of the man who Jills it, it is not less true, 

 that, in a thousand instances, the situation is necessary to shew 

 the value of the man by whom it is obtained. 



The popularity of M. Pinel among young men arose from 

 the same cause as that of all the most celebrated pathologists ; 

 from the hope he had conceived of the simplification of the 

 theory of the most difficult of all the arts ; of seeing it even 

 assume the forms of a regular science, by being reduced to fixed 

 principles, logically drawn from more elementary sciences, or 

 from the approximation of the facts that are peculiarly its own. 



The project of assimilating medicine to natural history, was 



• It was not published, but he introduced its principles into his treatises 

 on Mania and Mental Alienation. 



"I" He was at first conjoined in the chair of Hygiene, of which M. HaUe 

 was chief professor. On the death of Doublet, he obtained his removal to 

 the chair of Pathology- 



