The vitalism of the Montpellier medical school, more succinctly called "Montpellier vitalism", is a medical and philosophical school of thought.
| Part of a series on |
| Alternative medicine |
|---|
 |
The vitalism of the Montpellier medical school, more succinctly called "Montpellier vitalism", is a medical and philosophical school of thought.
It emerged in the second half of the 18th century under the influence of physicians and philosophers shaped by the intellectual context of the time. [1] Disease was interpreted in an original way as a dysfunction of the entire organism, compromising its integrity. [2] This medical philosophy persisted for over a century and found fertile ground at the University of Montpellier, an institution renowned for its openness to philosophical ideas. [3]
The term "vitalism" arose in the wake of the Montpellier school of medicine, in the south of France, and was notably introduced by Charles-Louis Dumas, dean of the city's Faculty of Medicine, in his Principes de Physiologie in 1800. [4] The vitalism of this school viewed living organisms as indivisible units animated by a "vital principle" that could not be reduced to the physical activity of organs, though it was also distinct from the thinking soul. [3] It positioned itself as an intermediate stance between the mechanistic perspective of the early 18th century and the animist vitalism attributed to Stahl, as well as between materialism and spiritualism. [1]
By the late 18th century, the Montpellier school enjoyed significant prestige in France and entered into rivalry with the Paris school, which was more materialist and advocated an "organicist" approach to medicine, focused on the study of organs. [2]
Montpellier is a city in southern France near the Mediterranean Sea. One of the largest urban centres in the region of Occitania, Montpellier is the prefecture of the department of Hérault. At the 2020 census, 299,096 people lived in the city proper, while its metropolitan area had a population of 813,272. The inhabitants are called Montpelliérains.
Fin de siècle is a French term meaning 'end of century', a phrase which typically encompasses both the meaning of the similar English idiom turn of the century and also makes reference to the closing of one era and onset of another. Without context, the term is typically used to refer to the end of the 19th century. This period was widely thought to be a period of social degeneracy, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning. The "spirit" of fin de siècle often refers to the cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, including ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and "a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence".
Jean Astruc was a professor of medicine in France at Montpellier and Paris, who wrote the first great treatise on syphilis and venereal diseases, and also, with a small anonymously published book, played a fundamental part in the origins of critical textual analysis of works of the Bible. Astruc was the first to propose and hypothesize, by using the techniques of textual analysis that were commonplace in studying the secular classics, the theory that Genesis was composed based on several sources or manuscript traditions, an approach now called the documentary hypothesis.
Jean-Antoine Chaptal, comte de Chanteloup was a French chemist, physician, agronomist, industrialist, statesman, educator and philanthropist.
Marie François Xavier Bichat was a French anatomist and pathologist, known as the father of modern histology. Although he worked without a microscope, Bichat distinguished 21 types of elementary tissues from which the organs of the human body are composed. He was also "the first to propose that tissue is a central element in human anatomy, and he considered organs as collections of often disparate tissues, rather than as entities in themselves".
Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science.
Roland Émile Mousnier was a French historian of the early modern period in France and of the comparative studies of different civilizations.
Albert Robida was a French illustrator, etcher, lithographer, caricaturist, and novelist. He edited and published La Caricature magazine for 12 years. Through the 1880s, he wrote an acclaimed trilogy of futuristic novels. In the 1900s he created 520 illustrations for Pierre Giffard's weekly serial La Guerre Infernale.
Joseph Frédéric Bérard was a French physician and philosopher. He was born at Montpellier.
Charles Gide was a French economist and historian of economic thought. He was a professor at the University of Bordeaux, at Montpellier, at Université de Paris and finally at Collège de France. His nephew was the author André Gide.
Roland Mortier was a prominent Belgian scholar, philosopher and academic, known for his contributions to linguistics and literature. Mortier obtained his PhD in Philology, specialisting in 18th century literature and Franco-German reports, from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1946. He was a member of the Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique and the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. In 1965, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Human Sciences.
Alfred Mathieu Giard was a French zoologist born in Valenciennes. He served as a professor of zoology at the Faculty of Sciences in Lille. He specialized in parasitology and the genus Giardia was named after him by Johann Künstler in 1882.
Steven Laurence Kaplan is professor emeritus and former Goldwin Smith Professor of European History in the Department of History at Cornell University, a lecturer at the Sciences Po Paris and at the prestigious École normale supérieure (ENS). His primary fields of expertise are French history, the history of markets, economic regulation, and political economy, and the history of food, specifically the history of bread, the grain trade and provisioning.
The Musée d'Anatomie Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière was a museum of anatomy formerly located on the eighth floor of the Faculty of Medicine, Paris V René Descartes University, 45, rue des Saints-Pères, 6th arrondissement of Paris, France. It was the largest anatomy museum in France. It was closed around 2005, with all its exhibits going into storage.
Pierre-Joseph Amoreux was a French physician and naturalist. He was the son of Guillaume Amoreux, also a physician and an inventor of surgical devices. He was the librarian at the Faculté de Médecine de Montpellier, in English Medical college of Montpellier. He was the author of many works on medicine, agriculture, botany and natural history. The most important are:
François de Dainville was a French geographer, historian and Jesuit priest. He was Professor and Research Director at the École pratique des hautes études since 1963, known for his work in the field of the history of education, and mapping from the 16th to 18th century.
Marcel César Poëte was a French librarian, historian and urban planning theoretician. He was a co-founder of the School of Advanced Urban Studies, where he taught, and was highly influential in developing new theories of urban planning in Paris in the first half of the 20th century.
Charles Le Roy was an 18th-century French physician and Encyclopédiste. An advisor to the king, he was professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the Société royale de médecine and the Academies of Montpellier, Nîmes and Toulouse.
Jean-Patrice Brosse was a French harpsichordist and organist.
Abd El Razzaq Ibn Mouhammed Ibn Hamadouch Al-Jazaïri, also known as Abd El Razzaq Al-Jazaïri was an important 17-18th-century Algerian Muslim physician and scientist. His most important work was Kachef Eroumouz fi eharh-El-aquakir ou El-alchbab , which is a treatise on medical subject classified in alphabetical order. This book was very successful in Algeria and Maghreb, and more generally throughout all of the Arab world, and influenced Islamic medicine.
