Pierre Jean George Cabanis

Pierre Jean George Cabanis (June 5, 1757 - May 5, 1808), was a French physiologist.

Biography

He was born at Cosnac (Corrèze), the son of Jean Baptiste Cabanis (1723-1786), a lawyer and agronomist. At the age of ten, he attended the college of Brives, where he showed great aptitude for study, but his independence of spirit was so great that he was almost constantly in a state of rebellion against his teachers and was finally expelled. He was then taken to Paris by his father and left to carry on his studies at his own discretion for two years. From 1773 to 1775 he travelled in Poland and Germany, and on his return to Paris he devoted himself mainly to poetry. About this time he sent to the Académie française a translation of the passage from Homer proposed for their prize, and, though he did not win, he received so much encouragement from his friends that he contemplated translating the whole of the Iliad.

At his father's wish, he gave up writing and decided to engage in a more settled profession, selecting medicine. In 1789 his Observations sur les hôpitaux (Observations on hospitals, 1790) procured him an appointment as administrator of hospitals in Paris, and in 1795 he became professor of hygiene at the medical school of Paris, a post which he exchanged for the chair of legal medicine and the history of medicine in 1799. He forssook poetry enjoyed the company of literati, including Diderot.

Ideas

Partly because of his poor health, he tended not to practise as a physician, his interests lying in the deeper problems of medical and physiological science. During the last two years of Honoré Mirabeau's life, Cabanis was intimately connected with him, and wrote the four papers on public education which were found among the Mirabeau's papers at his death, and were edited by the real author soon afterwards in 1791. During the illness which terminated his life Mirabeau trusted entirely to Cabanis' professional skills. Of the death of Mirabeau, Cabanis drew up a detailed narrative, intended as a justification of his treatment of the case. He was enthusiastic about the French Revolution and became a member of the Council of Five Hundred and then of the conservative senate, and the dissolution of the Directory was the result of a motion which he made to that effect. His political career was brief. Hostile to the policy of Napoleon Bonaparte, he rejected every offer of a place under his government. He also knew both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin during their time as Ambassadors in Paris, and later corresponded with them.

He saw sensibility as the highest form of life, the consciousness and intelligence as having evolved from sensibility, and sensibility itself as a property of the nervous system. The soul is not an entity, but a faculty; thought is the function of the brain. Just as the stomach and intestines receive food and digest it, so the brain receives impressions, digests them, and has as its organic secretion, thought. This material, mechanistic view, for him, explained how the body and mind functioned without any need for the supernatural, or for a creator.

Alongside this materialism, Cabanis held another principle. He belonged in biology to the vitalistic school of GE Stahl, and in the posthumous work, Lettre sur les causes premières (1824). the consequences of this opinion became clear. Life is something added to the organism: over and above the universally diffused sensibility there is some living and productive power to which we give the name of Nature. It is impossible to avoid ascribing to this power both intelligence and will. In us this living power constitutes the ego, which is truly immaterial and immortal. These results Cabanis did not think out of harmony with his earlier theory.

Publications

A complete edition of Cabanis's works was begun in 1825, and five volumes were published. His principal work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (On the relations between the physical and moral aspects of man, 1802), consists in part of memoirs, read in 1796 and 1797 to the Institute, and is a sketch of physiological psychology. Psychology is with Cabanis directly linked to biology.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Encyclopaedia Britannica Pierre Jean Geroge Cabanis
• Cabanis, P. J. G., and George Mora. On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, ISBN 9780801821134 (original Cabanis, Pierre Jean George. Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme. Paris: Crapart, Caille et Ravier, 1802.)
• Gillispie, Charles Coulston, and Frederic Lawrence Holmes. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Scribner, 1981 ISBN 9780684169620
• Schalow, Herman. 1906. Jean Cabanis.
• Stocking, George W. 1968. Race, culture, and evolution; essays in the history of anthropology. New York: Free Press. ISBN 9780029315309

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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