Biographical. Memoir of M Philippe Pinel. 209 



what the new professor especially announced, and with this 

 view he first endeavoured to form a precise language for the 

 descriptions of diseases, modelled on that which Linnaeus had 

 introduced into botany. He even carried his imitation so far as 

 to suppress the verbs in his French sentences, as they are in the 

 characteristic Latin phrases used in natural history. He sup- 

 posed that each disease, like each plant or animal, forms a cha- 

 racterized species ; and, in fact, adopting, in this respect, the 

 doctrines of the ancients, M. Pinel saw in each of our maladies 

 an attack, a development, periods, and a regular termination, 

 as each organized being has its birth, its growth, fixed periods for 

 each of the functions which it has to perform, and an inevitable 

 end : He imagined that, if the ordinary succession of symptoms 

 be often changed, it is not owing to the disease changing either 

 its species or its nature ; but to its being variously complicated 

 with diseases of other species, which may themselves be super- 

 complicated or become predominant, and thus, as it were, make 

 the original disease disappear. But so long as the complica- 

 tions remain secondary, they form in nosology what varieties 

 are in natural history. It is to this progress of each disease, 

 to the whole of the phenomena in succession, that the physician 

 ought to attend, and not to the momentary symptoms, which in 

 general give only fallacious indications. He ought, above all, to 

 use every endeavour to distinguish the complications, to ascertain 

 the effect of each of them, and thus, in some measure, to de- 

 compose the disease into its elements. This decomposition is 

 what M. Pinel named the application of analysis to medicine; 

 and at a period when the doctrines of Condillac were not less 

 predominant in philosophy than those of Linn«us in natural 

 history, this announcement was alone sufficient to ensure to his 

 book a favourable reception *. 



All further explanation, and even the most of inquiries into 

 proximate causes, seemed to him vain in the present state of 

 physiology. He rejected especially those alterations ni the 

 blood and humours, and all those other suppositions which have 

 varied in each succeeding age with the ideas that have been formed 



• Nosographie Philosophiqiie, ou Methode de I'Analyze applique a la Me- 

 dicine. Paris, 1798. 2 vols. Tlic fifth edition was published in 1813, 

 3 vols. 8vo. 



