104 MEMOIE OF MAGENDIE. 



of thinkers, who know how little intellectual partisanship is worth, and the 

 sympathy of the young, who delight to owe their convictions only to themselves. 



"Men pass," says the philosophic Bacon, "and knowledge is increased;" 

 mulii pcrtransihunt et avgchiiur scientia. Haller, Bichat, Magendie, had 

 scarcely constituted physiology, properly so called, the human physiology, when 

 a much wider horizon was disclosed. Thanks to comparative anatomy, that 

 antique study restored to our age, the view of the physkdogist has been enabled 

 to embrace the total assemblage of living beings. To observation, to experi- 

 ment, it has become possible to add the art, not less subtle and prolific, of unin- 

 terrupted comparisons; comparisons have brought to view relations ; relations 

 have guided us to laws. "Laws," says Montesquieu, "are the necessary rela- 

 tions of things." 



A new philosophic spirit, born of science and superior to science itself, pro- 

 pounds all the great questions of life, no longer studied only in each' particular 

 being, but considered as a constituent element of the universe : its origin,'^its 

 antiquity, its gradations, its successive variations ; it is a spirit which shrinks 

 not from disentangling, from following up the profound relations which connect 

 the history of life with the history of the globe; it sees the globe and life de- 

 veloped by a common evolution ; concerted progress reveals the unity of design ; 

 and to recall an eloquent phrase of the Eoman orator, " it almost lays hold .upon 

 Him who governs and controls everything — ipsum cuncta moderantem et regen- 

 tem pcne prchenderit." 



Towards the commencement of 1832 the ordinary course of M. Magendie's 

 life was turned aside. Vague and ill-boding reports were spread abroad, nor 

 was the phantom, though distant at first, slow in disengaging itself from its 

 shadows and presenting to our excited imaginations the assurance of a coming 

 pestilence. Then, when under the pressure of fear personal susceptibilities had 

 become acute even to cruelty, the noblest of purposes formed itself in the mind 

 of our colleague. Coming one day to our ordinary session he said to us : "I 

 am a physician, and that vocation summons me to the focus of the eviL I go 

 to Sunderland ; hoping that I shall be able to bring you thence, by studying 

 the cholera in the place of its appearance, some useful indications ! Invest me, 

 by delegation from your body, with more authority." Everywhere he was 

 received with interest and respect. Having reached the seaport, the centre of 

 contagion, he is informed that in a population of fishermen scattered along the 

 neighboring coast had occurred the outbreak of the disease. Proceeding directly 

 thither he finds collections of individuals exposed under miserable huts to all 

 the rigors of humidity, imcleanness, and vice, living, sleeping, eating between 

 the dead and the dying, and with instincts so brutal as to forbid the hope of any 

 helpful intervention.* 



Ordinary contagion was not an admissible theory. When anxiously asked, 

 on his return, " What is it 1 what shall we do ?" the only answer which could 

 be drawn from him in his dejection was : " I do not clearly know." 



Paris was still throbbing under the dread presentiment when the pestilence, 

 clearing the interval at a single bound, burst upon us like an explosion. Who 

 does not remember that at the outbreak, the extreme violence of which had till 

 then been unexampled on our continent, a man stricken was a man dead ? 

 Summoned on the first attack, from that moment M. Magendie was no longer 

 at his own disposal ; 'it was towards the hospital that he directed his steps. 

 " The rich," he said, " will not want for physicians ;" and traversing the ranks 

 of a deluded and infuriated crowd from which issued the cry : " Vengeance, 

 death to the physicians, death to the poisoners !" he ascended the steps of the 

 Hotel Dieu, renewing his self-forgetfulness on a thousand occasions in behalf of 



* He was accompanied in this expedition by M. Natalis Guillot, at present one of the 

 most distinguished members of our Faculty. 



/ 



