20 LIFE AND DEATH. 



medical circles. A man of profound erudition, a 

 collaborateur with d'Alembert in the Encyclopedia, 

 he exercisecJ quite a preponderant influence on the 

 medicine of his day. Stationed at Paris during part 

 of his career, physician to the King and the Duke of 

 Orleans, we may say that he supported his theories by 

 every imaginable influence which might contribute to 

 their success. In consequence of this, the medical 

 schools taught that vital phenomena are the immediate 

 effects of a force which has no analogues outside the 

 living body. This conception reigned unchallenged 

 up to the days of Bichat. 



After Bichat, the vitalism of Barthez, more or less 

 modified by the ideas of the celebrated anatomist, 

 continued to hold its own in all the schools of 

 Europe until about the middle of the nineteenth 

 century. Johannes Miiller, the founder of physiology 

 in Germany, admitted, about 1833, the existence of a 

 unique vital force "aware of all the secrets of the 

 forces of physics and chemistry, but continually in 

 conflict with them, as the supreme cause and regulator 

 of all phenomena." When death came, this principle 

 disappeared and left no trace behind. One of the 

 founders of biological chemistry, Justus Liebig, who 

 died in 1873, shared these ideas. The celebrated 

 botanist, Candolle, who lived up to 1893, taught at 

 the beginning of his career that the vital force was one 

 of the four forces ruling in nature, the other three 

 being — attraction, affinity, and intellectual force. 

 Flourens, in France, made the vital principle one of 

 the five properties of forces residing in the nervous 

 system. Another contemporary, Dressel, in 1883, 

 endeavoured to bring back into fashion this rather 

 primitive, monistic, and efficient vitalism. 



