John Canguilhem - Ideology and Rationality in The History of The Life Sciences-MIT Press (1988)

Ideology and Rationality in the History of the
Life Sciences
Georges Canguilhem
translated by Arthur Goldhammer
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, .England
--�
068182
English translation copyright© 1988 Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Originally published under the title Ideologie et rationalite dans l'histoire

des sciences de la vie: Nouvelles etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des
sciences, copyright© 1977 Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris,
France.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying,
recording, or information storage and retrieval, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
This book was typeset by Graphic Composition Inc.

and was printed and bound by Halliday Lithograph
in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Canguilhem, Georges, l 904-
Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences.
Translation of: Ideologie et rationalite clans l'histoire des sciences de

la vie.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. Life sciences-History. 2. Life sciences-Philosophy. I. Title.
QH305.C2613 1988 574'.09 88-610
ISBN 0-262-03137-X
Contents
Translator's Preface vii
Preface ix
Introduction: The Role of Epistemology in

Contemporary History of Science l
I Scientific and Medical Ideologies in the

Nineteenth Century
l What Is a Scientific Ideology? 27

2 John Brown's System: An Example of Medical
Ideology 41
3 Bacteriology and the End of Nineteenth-Century
"Medical Theory" SI
II Triumphs of Biological Rationality in the

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
4 The Development of the Concept of Biological

Regulation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries 81
Vl 5 On the History of the Life Sciences since Darwin
6 The Question of Normality in the History of
Biological Thought
Sources 1 47
Index
CONTENTS
Translator's Preface
Georges Canguilhem was born in I904. He studied and

began to teach philosophy but while teaching decided to
work toward a medical degree. His reasons are worth
noting:
It is not necessarily to learn more about men�al illness that
a professor of philosophy will take an interest in medicine.
Nor is it necessarily to practi�e a scientific discipline. What
I expected from medicine was nothing other than an intro
duction to concrete human problems. Medicine seemed to
me then, and still seems to me now, a technique or an art
at the crossroads of several sciences more than a science in
the strict sense of the word. Two problems-that of the
relation between science and technology, and that of norms
and normality-could, I thought, be more precisely for
mulated and more fully elucidated by someone with med
ical training . . . . The present work [his I943 thesis, The
Normal and the Pathologican is therefore an effort to in
tegrate some of the methods and results of medicine into
philosophical speculation.
Canguilhem with his life's work has admirably ful
filled this statement of intention. Along with Gaston Bach
elard he has been one of the primary influences in the
reorien�ation of French philosophy in recent years. It was
·Bachelard who introduced.the concept of an "epistemolog
ical break," a concept whose importance and usefulness
Canguilhem has demonstrated in his own way. But Can
guilhem's work also shows how philosophy can span the
vm coupure, so to speak, in order to reestablish continuity at
another level. For Canguilhem , error is the truth of the past
transcended, and he is able to show in concrete detail why
the history of science should be studied not as a steady
march toward truth but as a process of formation and re
formation of concepts and models. His method is more
easily grasped in action than through description, and
there is perhaps no better introduction to his work than
the essay (included here) entitled "Bacteriology and the
End of Nineteenth-Century 'Medical Theory.' "
In l 95 5 Canguilhem succeeded Bachelard as director
of the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, a
position that he held until his retirement a few years ago.
Perhaps the most noted of the younger philosophers influ
enced by his thought was the late Michel Foucault, who
wrote of his debt to Canguilhem's pioneering work. Inter
ested readers may wish to consult Le Normal et le patho
logique (1966, containing the 1943 thesis and later essays
and now available in English), La Formation du concept
de re"flexe ( 1955, reissued 1977), La Connaissance de la vie
(1952, 1965), Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sci
ences ( 1968), and the volume from which the present
translation was made, Ideologie et rationalite dans l'his
toire des sciences de la vie (1977). Canguilhem also pro
vided a preface to a recent edition of Claude Bernard's
Le�ons sur les phenomenes de la vie communs aux ani
maux et aux vegetaux (1966).
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
Preface
To err is human, to persist in error is diabolical. It is not

up to me to decide the degree of error embodied in the
texts gathered here. I am surely too old to make public
confession of my mistakes, to proclaim my allegiance to
newly instituted epistemological authorities at the cost of
renouncing methodological axioms that I borrowed some
forty years ago and subsequently exploited in my own way
and at my own risk, not without emendation, revision, and
reorientation.
In 1967-68, under the influence of work of Michel
Fouc�ult and Louis Althusser, I introduced the concept of
scientific ideology into my lectures. This was not simply a
mark of my interest in and acceptance of the original con
tributions of those two thinkers to the canons of scientific
history. It was also a way of refurbishing without rejecting
the lessons of a teacher whose books I read but whose lec
tures I was never able to attend. For whatever liberties my
young colleagues may have taken with the teachings of
Gaston Bachelard, their work was inspired by and built
on his.
l do not believe, therefore, that the reader of my first
Etudes ·d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Studies in
the History and Philosophy of the Sciences) will fin.cl in
x these essays signs of change or evolution in my thinking.':
As for the question whether my indifference to the devel
opment of a history that would substitute for the distinc
tion between science and philosophy (or, in other words,
between science and literature) a notion of their mutual
interpenetration should or should not earn me the distinc
tion of being a "conceptualist fossil," I must admit I do not
much care. When one's own insignificant research has led
one to recognize the existence of discontinuity in history, it
would be inappropriate to refuse to recognize discontinui
ties in the history of history. To each his own discontinuity,
his own revolutions in the world of scholarship.
On the other hand I should like very much to answer
a question that has been raised by no one but myself. .Ihe_
author of The Archaeology of Knowledge, whose analysis
of scientific ideology I have found quite useful, has aistin
guished several "thresholds of transformation" in the his
tory of knowledge: a threshold of positivity, a threshold
of epistemologization, a threshold of scientificity, and a
threshold of formalization.1 In my published work I am
not sure that I have distinguished as carefully as Michel
Foucault might wish among the various thresholds crossed
by the disciplines I have studied. It seems to me in any case
that, the claims of certain geneticists notwithstanding,
none of those disciplines has yet crossed the threshold of
formalization.2 Un�ike Foucault, however, I do not believe
that experimental medicine as practiced by Claude Bernard
and microbiology as practiced by Louis Pasteur were
equally inadequate in their contribution to making a sci
ence of clinical medicine. I readily admit that I failed to
pay adequate attention to the question of thresholds of
*[Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences was p�blished

by Librairie Vrin in 1968. The French edition of the present work
bears the subtitle Nouvelles etudes d'histoire et de philosophie
des sciences.-Trans.]
PREFACE
x1 transformation. But nineteenth-century medicine and bi
ology lend themselves less readily than, say, nineteenth
century chemistry to dissection of the conditions that made
"progress" possible. One can still argue, I think, that Ber
nard's physiological medicine exhibits a case in which "ep
istemologization," at the hands of a Bernard himself in love
with philosophizing, raced far in "advance" even of posi
tive empirical results. By contrast, Pasteur, a chemist rather
than a physician, was primarily interested in making a pos
itive contribution to research and not unduly concerned
with developing a consistent epistemology. 3
It may be, finally, that my analyses are not sufficiently
subtle or rigorous. I leave it to the reader to decide whether
this is a question of discretion, sloth, or incapacity.
Notes
l
See Michel Foucault, L'Archeologie du savoir, pp. 243-247.
2
Cf. J. H. Woodger, Axiomatic Method in Biology (Cambridge:
1937), and "Formalization in Biology," Logique et analyse, new
series, l (August 1 9 5 8 ) ."
3
Cf. F. Dagognet, Methodes et doctrine dans /'oeuvre de Pasteur
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), conclusion.
G.C.
June 1977
PREFACE
Ideology and Rationality in the History of the
Life Sciences
Introduction: The Role of Epistemology in
Contemporary History of Science
To anyone who would examine the relations between epis

temology and the history of science, one fact stands out
above all others: namely, that we possess at present more
manifestoes and programs of research than we do hard
facts. Statements of intention are numerous, concrete re
sults meager.
Compared with the history of science, a discipline
with a history of its own, epistemology at first sight seems
to find itself in a false position. Chronologically, the history
of science owes nothing to the philosophical discipline that
appears to have acquired the name epistemology in 1854.1
Montucla's Histoire des mathematiques ( 175S), Bailly's
Histoire de l'astronomie (1775- 178 2), and Kurt Sprengel's
Versuch einer pragmatischen .Geschichte der Arzneikunde
( 1792- 1803) were all written without reference to any sys
tem of critical or normative concepts. No doubt all these
works were informed, whether their authors were aware
of it or not, by a period consciousness, impersonally for
mulated in the doctrine of infinite perfectibility of the hu
man spirit and based on an almost unbroken series of
revolutions in cosmology, mathematics, and physiology- ·
. revolutions associated with the names Copernicus, Galileo,
Descartes, Harvey, Newton, Leibniz, and Lavoisier. On
2 grounds of continuity it was therefore legitimate to believe
in further scientific progress to come: Although Spr'engel
(the date being 1792) explicitly alludes to critical philoso
phy in the introduction to his history of medicine, he men
tions it simply as a doctrine in which certain physicians
happen to be well versed, just as certain of their predeces
sors were well versed in dogmatic, empirical, or skeptical
philosophy, rather than as a new and effective instrument
('fi
for judging the validity of scientific methods. ence there
is no point in reproaching eighteenth- and ·nineteenth
century historians of science for not having employed any
of the epistemological concepts that today's philosophers
are attempting to enforce as rules ·for writing scientific
history.
Among historians of science, those who dislike _the
scrutiny of their discipline by epistemologists have not
been remiss in pointing out that epistemology, itself nour
ished by the history of science, cannot presume to give
more than it has received; that is � it cannot pretend to re
form the principles of a discipline from which it in fact
derived. The acrimony of the controversy is not unrelated,
however vaguely or loosely, to the ancient view of the re
lation between the disciplines and the faculties of the soul,
according to which history corresponds to Memory. It is
hard to say whose ambition is more exorbitant, the histor
ians' or the epistemologists'. Which i� more pr_!!tentious: to
claim memory or judgment? Errors of judgment are acci
dental, but alteration is of the essence of memory. About
reconstructions in the history of science one must make a
point that has repeatedly been made about reconstructions
in other fields of history-political, diplomatic, military,
and so on: namely, that contrary to Leopold von Rank�s
dictum, the historian can never claim to represent things as
they really were (wie es eigentlich gewesen).
D�jksterhuis's comment that "the. history of science . .
- forms-not only the memory of science but also its episte-
I 1
INTRODUCTION
3 mological laboratory" has frequently been commented
on.2 Since elaboration is different from restitution, one
may conclude that epistemology's claim to give more than
it has received is legitimate. J;,J?!��mology shifts the foe!!§
of interest from the history of science to scienc� as se�;.; in
;
the light of history. To take as one's object of i�qui� �th:
ing other than sources, inventions, influences, priorities,
simultaneities, and successions is at bottom to fail �o
distinguish between science and other aspects of culture. A
history of science free of epistemological contamination
would inevitably reduce the state of a scientific discipline
plant physiology in the eighteenth century, say-to a sum
mary o� chronological and logical connections among var
ious systems of propositions pertaining to various classes
of problems or solutions. The quality of historical work
would then be measured by breadth of erudition and
shrewdness in analyzing the connections between the work
of different scientists, by skill in ferreting out similarities
and differences in their views. But the diverse quality of
historical works cannot . conceal the fundamentally identi
cal relation of the historian to the object whose history is
being told. A pure history of eighteenth-century botany
would consicl�r "� �!�nic�l" nothing but what botanists of
the period took to be within their scope of inquiry. Pure
historians are interested only in what scientists thought
they were doing and how they went about doing it. But a
fundamental question must be asked: Does this science of
the past constitute a past for the science of today?
Taken �n an absolute sense, the "past of a science" is
a vulgar concept. The "past" is a catchall of retrospective
inquiry. Whether the question is the shape of the earth, the
�'hominization" of man, the social division of labor, or the
alcoholic delirium of a particular individual, one turns to
the "past" as required by present needs in search of more
or-less remote antecedents to some present state of affairs.
The. past, moreover, is conceived beforehand as a vessel of
THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

4 infinite capacity. Consider again the example of plant phys
iology. In the broad sense just defined, its past would in
clude everything that people called botanists, physicians,
chemists, horticulturists, agronomists, or economists
might have written in regard to conjectures, observations,
or experiments with a bearing on the relation between
structure and function in objects variously termed herbs,
plants, or vegetables. An idel:i. of the abundance of such
source material, even allowing for selection based on
chronological and political criteria, can be had by consult
ing the very useful catalogue of the works of French bota
nists who belonged to the Academy of Sciences compiled
by Lucien Plantefol to commemorate the group's three
hundredth anniversary.3 But a catalogue of prior works is,
at the time it is compiled, a history of botany in the sense
that botany is itself a history, by which I mean an ordered
.
description, of plants. The hist�ry of a science is thus a
summary of readings in a specialized library, a repository
and conservatory of knowledge produced and expounded
from the time of the tablet and papyrus, parchment and
incunabula to that of the magnetic tape. This is, to be sure_,
an ideal library, a library of the mind, which by defi'tiiti�n
contains a record of everything ever said about the subject.
The totality of the past is represented here as an unbroken
expanse. Within this expanse it is easy to locate places
from which it is possible to trace a line of progress to what
ever one's current object of interest happens to be. Some
historians are quite bold in loc1ating these antecedents,
while others are more cautious. But it is simply boldness
or prudence that distinguishes their work. One can argue,
however, that the history of science is entitled to expect
from epistemology a set of ethical criteria, by which I mean
a set of criteria for judging which moves within the vast
expanse of the past are legitimate and which are not. After
much rigorous argument this is the conclusion reached by
Suzanne Bachelard in her Epistemology and History of Sci-
INTRODUCTION
5 ·ence.4 In·her words: "The fact that the historian's work is
retrospective establishes limits but also bestows certain
powers. The historian constructs his objects in an ideal
space-time. It is up to him to make sure that this space
time is not imaginary."
To return to my example, the eighteenth-century bot
anists who undertook to do research in plant physiology
looked to contemporary animal physiology for models.
Some were physicist-physiologists like Stephen Bales,
while others were chemist-physiologists lik� Jean Senebier
and Jan Ingenhousz. Yet simply because contemporary
plant physiology uses analytical methods from chemistry
and experimental techniques from physics, it would be au
dacious to say the least to construct a history in which a
continuity of intention was allowed to c-0nceal a radical
discontinuity of object, for biochemistry and biophysics
have made substantial innovations in the nature of plant
physiology. Between the chemistry of oxidation and the
biochemistry of enzymatic reductions, plant physiology
first had to become cellular physiology (and cellular theory
of course met with tremendous opposition) and then had
to rid itself of its early concepts of the cell and protoplasm
�
in order to study metabolism at the molecular leveL n his
remarkable History of Biochemistry Marcel Florkin,5 bor
rowing Gaston Bachelard's concept of an "epistemological
break," shows how an enzymatic theory replaced a proto
plasmic theory as a result of Eduard Biichner's discovery
(in 1897) of noncellular fermentation, which for a long
time was m�sunderstood and rejected by proponents of
Pasteurian biology. 6
It should by now be clear why the past of a present
day science is not the same thing as that science in the past.
In order to understand the sequence of research, experi
mentation, and conceptualization without which it would
be impossible to comprehend the work of Gabriel Bertrand
(1897) on the necessary presence of metals in the molecules

6 of enzymes and on the role of what he called "co
enzymes," 7 there is no point in going all the way back to
Theodore de Saussure ( 176 5- 1 84 5) and his work on plant
nutrition. By contrast, there is good reason to look at
the work of Saussure's contemporary Brisseau de Mirbel
(1776-1 8 5 4) and the origins of cellular theory in botany,
which can shed light on the heuristic value of the localiza
tion within the cell of object.$ th�t figured in the early work
on enzymatic biochemistry. (�n other words, events situated
at the same point in historical time may or may not have
theoretical significance. What matters is the overall line of
scientific discourse. A particular end point may be related
to one or more conceptually homogeneous points of de ·,,
parture. Each such trajectory has its own characteristic

nature.
Well, then, the historian of science may object, why
should the role claimed by the epistemologist not be filled
by the scientist? Who but the scientist has the competence
to say, based on his instinct about the direction of future
developments, which end points are of scientific interest ..
and therefore worthy of historical reconstruction? Such an
appeal to a third party can only surprise or embarrass the
epistemologist. He is well aware that there have been, and
are, scientists who, as respite from their scientific labors,
have turned to writing the history of science, and that there
have been, and are, scientists who, with the aid of episte
mological concepts borrowed from philosophers, have
written critical histories not without constructive influence
on the subsequent course of scientific progress. Ernst
Mach's Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung (The Devel
opment of Mechanics, 1 8 83) is a celebrated case in point,
whose influence on the work of Einstein is well known.
Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat has given us a historical and
epistemological case study in her History of the Principle
of Relativity. 8 What epistemologist would not subscribe to
INTRODUCTION
7 'her .introductory statement, which dismisses a certain ap
proach to the writing of history:
At the risk of disappointing certain specialists, I shall argue
that there is no authentic and unsurpassable principle of
relativity whose earliest development in scientific theory it
is the job of the historian to describe. No imperfect but
promising first approximation lurks behind the veil of ig
norance and prejudice awaiting anointment. The very idea
is antirelativistic . . . . Born in the confusion of late Aristo
telianism, made over by contradictions inherent in the elu
sive concept of the ether, the idea of relativity in each case
appears to have been associated more with what followed
it than with what preceded.9 An innovative vision, it
lighted its own way and to a large extent even determined
the meandering of its path and the plumbing of its
depths.1 0
'
It is one thing to recognize the existe�ce and value of
an epistemological history written by scientists.11 It is an
other, however, to argue that the epistemologist must
therefore concede that he has no special relation to the his
tory of science on the grounds that a similar relation can
be established between the scientist and the history of sci
ence, to the great benefit of the latter. Or that the episte
mologist must remain an outsider, because while his
relation to history may appear similar to that of the scien
tist, his motivation is fundamentally different.
Jean-Toussaint Desanti, having noticed the widening
gap between science and philosophy, questions the rele
vance of the questions that philosophers-epistemolo
gists-have posed to scientists concerning the ways and
means by which knowledge is produced.12 Smee;: p�
ical discourse does not produce knowledge, is philosopJi.J:
disqualified from discussing the conditions of its produc
tion? "Must one resolve to say nothing about the s �
·�nless one produces scientific knowledge? Hardly. It is true
that the task of criticism, which is to counter internalist

8 and mimetic accounts of the work of science, requires
adopting a standpoint within scientific utterance. That this
necessarily involves practicing science is a part, by no
means the least important part, of Gaston Bachelard's
teaching. "One must either say nothing about science or
speak from the inside, that is, by practicing it." 13 But there
is practice and there is practice. If the word is used in the
sense in which Descartes said <{hat he put his method into
practice in solving mathematical problems, 14 it may seem
that productive practice of this kind is not within the phi
losopher's reach; if it were, he would be among those in
the vanguard of scientific progress. For the epistem<:>l_ogig,.
practicing a science amounts to mimicking the practice of
the scientist by attempting to reconstitute the means by
which knowledge is produced throµgh stu�ious atter};
tion to the papers in which the producer explains his
behavior.15
Since a scientific investigator in his theoretical work
must necessarily take an interest in the work of his or her
immediate predecessors, and since every immediate prede�
cessor also has an .immediate predecessor, it must be con
ceded that science has a natural interest in its own history,
even if that interest is not very widespread among scien
tists. But the scientist's historical interest is part of the heu
ristics of research; hence it does not extend to very remote
antecedents, where "remoteness" is to be construed in
conceptual rather than chronological terms. A particular
nineteenth-century mathematician may have been more in
terested in, say, Archimedes' work than in Descartes's.
Everyone's time is limited, moreover, and in the mind of
the scientist the importance of a theoretical advance natu
rally bulks larger than does historical investigation.
Unlike the scientist, the epistemologist is free to in-
. dulge his historical interest if not full-time then at least a
large part of the time. His is an interest of vocation rather
.
t!J.�m ave>cation, for his problem is to abstract from the his-
INTRODUCTION
9 · tory of science in the manifest sense-that is, a more or
le.s s systematic series of pronouncements claiming to state
the truth-in order to uncover the history of science in the
latent sense-that is, the order ........of
--·�-·-· ·-- �.-...... ..conceptual
...
-....________
...
progress
:,___-that -
is visible only after the fact and of \Vhich the present notion
" -
ot scien!ific: ·iiti111 ·1s-t:&e-·I>r-0-vi8i011�L p�i�1 �r�u1mi;;ation�
Further�ore, because' 'the eplstem:oioglsr's' KistorICa1Tnt�r
est is primary rather than secondary, he can range more
freely than the scientist. His breadth of knowledge can
compensate for the relative inferiority of his mastery of the
latest scientfic discoveries and analytic tools. For example,
Sir Gavin de Beer, in the course of research that led to the
publication of his Notebooks on Transmutation of Species
(1960- 19 67), became interested in rereading Darwin. His
historical interest was motivated and illµminated by his
work as an embryologist, which enabled him to see Dar
winian and pre-Darwinian concepts of the relation of on
togeny to phylogeny in a new light.1 6 But when Camille
Limoges, drawing upon previously unpublished work of
Darwin collected, published, and commented on by Gavin
de Beer, challenged an assertion that had been repeated for
nearly a century to the effect that Darwin had derived from
his reading of Malthus the conc�ptual framework he
needed to make sense of his observations, he revealed a
quite different view of the past.17 In effect, Limoges was
challenging that mainstay · of traditional historiography, the
concept of infiuence. Using Darwin as an example, he
sought to illustrate a new way of reading the sources with
out attaching any special privilege to those in which an
author believed that he was explaining his own assump
tions. By revealing a sharp contrast between the concept of
natural selection and its predecessor, natural economy,
Limoges was able to locate the cleavage between the new
and the old natural history: the key point of contention
was the concept of adaptatio!-J, which was now understood
in a probabilistic sense and related to observations of a

IO biogeographical (or, as we would now say, ecological)
order.18
The interest of epistemology in the history of science
is not new. It is, as I have noted, a matter of?vocation. In a
sense, epistemology has always been historical. When the
theory of knowledge ceased to be grounded in an ontology
incapable of accounting for the terms of reference em
ployed in the new cosmological systems, i�eees
sary to examine not the justifications but the meth-0ds of
science itself. Kant, in the second preface ( 1 787) to the Cri
tique of Pure Reason, used a brief history of the mathe
matical and physical sciences, condensed into just a few
lines, to justify his intention to invert the existing relation
ship between the known and the knowing (le connu et le
connaftre) . Commentators on this preface have tradition
ally stressed the pseudoreversal effected by Copernicus and
neglected, I think wrongly, the novel meaning of the terms
in which Kant defines the driving force behind what he
calls revolutions in the techniques of thinking (Denkart).
The mathematician (first exemplified by, say, Thales or
some other Greek thinker) first had to produce (hervor
bringen) the objects that figured in his proofs. Similarly, the
physicist (modeled on Galileo or Toricelli) first had to pro
duce (hervorbringen) the objects of his experiments, and
this production was a result of purely intellectual progress
( Vorangehen) . The very fact that Kant believed he could
abstract from scientific work a definitive set of rules and
norms governing the production of knowledge tells us a
great deal about the culture of the period. When one thinks
of the history of science in terms of the progress of enlight
en'1Jent, it is difficult to envision the possibility of a history
of categories of scientific thought.
In establishing such a close connection between epis
temology and the history of science I am of course drawing
on the inspirational teachings of Gaston Bachelard.1 9 The
func:l_am�ptal concepts of Bachelard's epistemology are ·
INTRODUCTION
· . now · well known, so well known, perhaps, that they
11
.'by
have been disseminated and discussed, especially outside
France, in a vulgarized, not to say sanitized, form, devoid
of the polemical force of the original. Among them are the
notions of new_!cientific spirit, epistemological obstacle,
epistemological bxe�k (rupture), a�d ob solete or "offi.cjal"
science. Italian, Spanish, German, and even English readers
have come to know Bachelard's work not firsthand but
through translations of critical commentaries, particularly
that of Dominiqµe Lecourt. To my mind, the best summary
of Bachelard's research and teaching can be found in the
concluding pages of his last epistemological work, Le A{a:
terialisme rationnel. 20 Here the notion of epistemological
discontinuity in scientific progress is supported by argu
ments based on the history and teaching· of science in the
twentieth century. Bachelard concludes with this state
ment: "Contemporary science is based on the search for
true (veritable) facts and the synthesis of truthful (veri
dique) laws." By truthful Bachelard does not mean that
scientific laws simply tell a truth permanently inscribed in
, objects or intellect. Truth is simply what science speaks.
How, then, do we recognize that a statement is scientific?
By the fact that scientific truth never springs fully blown
from the head of its creator. A science is a discourse gov
erned by critical correction. If this discourse has a history
whose course the historian believes he can reconstruct, 1t is
because it is a history whose meaning the epistemologist
must reactivate. "Every historian of science is necessarily a
historiographer of truth. The events of science are linked
together in a steadily growing truth. . . . At various mo
ments in the history of thought the past of thought aJld
experience can he. seen in a new light." 2\._Guided by this
new light, the historian should not make the error of think
ing that persistent use of a particular term indicates an in
variant underlying concept or: that persistent allusion to
· similar experimental observations connotes affinities of

12 method or approach. By observing these rules he will avoid
the error of, for instance, seeing Maupertuis as a prema
ture transformist or geneticist. 22
There is a clear difference between retrospective criti
cal evaluation of the scientific past in the light of a present
state of knowledge (certain, precisely because it is scien
tific, to be surpassed or rectified in the future) and system
atic, quasi-automatic application to the past of some
standard model of scientific theory. The latter is more in
the nature of an epistemological inquisition than a histor
ical inquiry. The van oben bis unten or "top-down
method," as Father Joseph T. Clark calls it, requires the
historian of science to take the analytic philosopher's word
for it that science has now achieved maturity and that in
the future new results will be produced according to the
same logical model as now.23 Accordingly, the work of the
historian equipped with a finished scientific theory is to ask
why past theories failed to achieve logical maturity. But, as
Ernest Nagel observed in the discussion, to use a contem
porary model as a universal touchstone results not in pro-�
jecting a powerful searchlight into the past but in
blinkering our vision. 24 To imagine how, for example, Cop
ernicus might have overcome certain limitations of his
theory by formalizing all his assumptions is to confound
logical with historical possibility. In Nagel's view, Clark's
thesis betrays dogmatic confidence in analytic philosophy
and its theory of knowledge.
Thus it is easy to distinguish between epistemological
recursion (recurrence epistemologique) and the top-down
method. It is no less easy to distinguish between what
-
Bachelard calls "normality" 25 and what Thomas Kuhn
calls "normal science." 26 'jfhe two epistemologies do share
certain points in comrru;n: in particular, the observation
that scientific textbooks overemphasize the continuity of
scientific research. Both stress the discontinuous nature of
progress. Nevertheless, while the fundamental concepts
INTRODUCTION
13 . share a family resemblance, they do no� really belong to
the same branch. This has beep poted by Father Fram;ois
Russo, who, despite reservations about the claims of su
periority to which epist�mological historians are some
times prone, argues that Kuhn is mistaken about the nature
of scientific rationality as such. 27 Though ostensibly con
cerned to preserve Karl Popper's emphasis on the necessity
of theory and its priority over experiment, Kuhn is unable
to shake off the legacy of logical positivism and join the
rationalist camp, where his key concepts of "paradigm"
and "normal science" would seem to place him. These con
cepts presuppose intentionality and regulation, and as such
they imply the possibility of a break W:ith established rules
and procedures. Kuhn would have them play this role
.
without granting them the means to do so, for he regards
them as simple cultural facts. For a him, a paradigm is the
re�ult of a choice by i!s users. Normal ;cienceis defined by
the practice in a given period of a group of specialists in a
university research setting. Instead of concepts of philo
sophical critique, we are dealing with mere social psychol
ogy. This accounts for the embarrassment evident in the
appendix to the second edition of the Structure of Scientific
Revolutions when it comes to answering the question of
how the truth of a theory is to be understood.
By contrast, when Bachelard speaks of a norm or
value, it is because in thinking of his favorite science, math
ematical physics, he identifies theory with mathematics.
His rationalism is built on a framework of mathematism.
In mathema�ics one speaks not of the n�gnal but of the
-
normed. In contrast to orthodox logi cal positivists, Bach
'
elard holds that mathemat�cs has epistemological content,
whether actual or potential, and that progress in mathe
matics adds to that content., On this point he agrees with
Jean Cavailles, whose ci;itique of logical positivism has lost
-
nothing of i�s vig9� or _ri�or. Cavailles refutes Carnap by

14 showing that "mathematical reasoning is internally coher
ent in a way that cannot be rushed. It is by nature progres
sive.'' 28 As to the nature of 'this progress, he concludes,
One of the fundamental problems with the doctrine of sci
ence is precisely that progress is in no way comparable to
increasing a given volume· by adding a small additional
amount to what is already there, the old subsisting with
the new. Rather, it is perpetual revision, in which some
things are eliminated and others elaborated. What comes
after is greater than what went before, not because the
present contains or supersedes the past but because the one
necessarily emerges from the other and in its content car
ries the mark of its superiority, which is in each case
unique.29
Nevertheless, the use of epistemological
- recursio_n as a
historical method is not universally �alid. It best fitsthe
disciplines for the study of which it was originally devet
oped: mathematical · physics and nuclear chemistry. Of
course there is no reason why one cannot study a particu
larly advanced speciality and then abstract rules for the
production of knowledge that may with caution be extrap
olated to other disciplines. In this sense the method can be
not so much generalized as broadened. Yet it cannot b� �
extended to other areas of the history of science withoqt_a

good deal of reflection about the specific nature of the a.r�a
to be studied. Consider, for example, eighteenth-century
natural history. Before applying Bachelardian norms and
procedures to the study of this subject, one must ask when
a conceptual cleavage3 0 occurred whose effects were as rev
olutionary as those of the introduction of relativity and
quantum mechanics into physics. Such a cleavage is barely
perceptible in the early post-Darwin years,3 1 and to the ex
tent that it is visible at all it is only as a result of subsequent
cataclysms: the rise of genetics and molecular biology.
Hence the recursive methq� must be use..Qjydicious_!y,
and we mll.�t learn mo�e a�Ol;J;t �ht:: nat�re .?.! .�J?j,�temoJ,qg_:,
INTRODUCTION
15 ical breaks. Often the historian in search of a major water- .
shed is tempted to follow �ant in assuming that science
begins with a flash of insight, a work of genius. Frequently
the effects of that flash are said to be all-embracing, affect
ing the whole of a scientist's work. But the reality is differ
ent. Even within one· man's work we often find a series of
fundamental or partial insights rather than a sfogle dra
m�ti� break. A theory is woven of many strands, some of
which may be quite new while others are borrow�d from
older fabrics. The Copernican and Galilean revolutions did
not sweep away tradition in one fell swoop. Alexandre
Koyre has located what he considers to be the decisive
"mutation" in Galileo's work, the decisive change in think
ing that made him unable to accept medieval mechanics
and astronomy.3 2 For Koyre, the elevation of �ath�m�t
ics-"-arithmetic and geometry-to the status of key to in
telligibility in physics indicated a rejection of Aristotle in
favor of Plato. Koyre's argument is sufficiently well Jmo��
that I shall not discuss it in detail. But in painting a quite
accurate picture of Galileo as an Archimedean as much as
a Platonist, is not Koyre abusing the freedom of the recur
sive method? 33 And is he not somewhat overstating the
case in saying that the change in Galileo's thinking marked
a total repudiation of Aristotelianism? Is not Ludovico
Geymonat right to point out that Koyre's interpretation
neglects all that Galileo p�eserved from Aristotelian tradi
tion even as he was proposing that mathematics be used to
�
bolster logic�3. 1Thus Koyre is himself challenged on the
very point on which he challenged Pierre Duhem when he
wrote, "The apparent continuity in the development of
physics from the Middle Ages to the present (a continuity
that Caverni and Duhem have so assiduously stressed) is
illusory. . . . No matter how well the groundwork has been
�
. laid, a revolution is still a revolution."35
Parenthetically; it is worth asking hy in matters �
I6 history and epistemology Duhem even more than K<pyre
has been the favorite French interlocutor of English and
American historians and analytic philosophers. The an
swer, I submit, is that Duhem's fidelity to Aristotelian sche
mata for the study of scientific theories is more congenial
to the progeny of the logical positivists than either Koyre's
historical mathematism or, even more, the militant math
ematism of Cavailles and Bachelard. 36
Is it not paradoxical, moreover, that an epistemology
of discontinuity is needed to justify fully the relevance of a
history of science inspired by an epistemology of conti
nuity ? Different historical norms result from different areas
t
of interest. The epistemology of disc�!1tinuity is appro
priate to a period of accelerated change in science, a period
in which change is measured in years or even months. By
contrast, the epistemology of continuity has a natura af
finity with periods in which knowledge is just awakening.
But the epistemologist who is aware of discontinuities is by
no means contemptuous of the epistemology of continuity,
although he can be ironic about philosophers who believe
in nothing else. Bachelard understood Duhem but found
Emile Meyerson hard to tolerate. "In sum, the epistemo
logical axiom laid down by the champions of continuity is
that since things move slowly in the beginning, progress is
continuous. The philosopher fails to advance matters. He
sees no reason to endure the new age, an age in which
scientific progress is literally exploding on every side, ex�
ploding traditional epistemology along with it." 3 7
Can the historian who practices the recursive method
predict that that method will one day be supplanted by
another? Rapid scientific progress requir�s f!_�q�en!_rewrit-
)pg of history. The discipline whose history one is �tud)d.ng
__
actually changes with each epistemological break, even if

·
llgg_�i.�_tic habit leaves its name unchanged. F;an�oi;j;
cob's Logic of Life (1970) differs from Charles Singer's .
INTRODUCTION
17 .History <;>f Biology (second edition, 19 50) not just because
·
the volume of knowledge had increased in the interim but
hecause the structure of DNA was unraveled in 1 9 5 3 and
because new concepts were introduced into biology
some, like organization, adaptation, and heredity, with
old names, others, like message, program, and teleonomy,
with new.38
It is not simply a matter of rewriting history, however.
For historical studies, too, can become obsolete.
The younger generation of French epistemologists
. has
found hvo ways of distancing itself from what is no long�r
vital in the history of science. Dominique Lecourt, the au
thor of a detailed, incisive, and comprehensive exegesis of
the work of Gaston Bachelard, argues that Bachelard never
appreciated the significance of his own wgrk in epistemol
ogy.3 9 According to Lecourt, Bachelard failed to free him
self from the toils of idealist philosophy, when he should
have seen that his conclusions were actually consonant
with the doctrine known as dialectical materialism. The
production of knowledge, Lecourt argues, is a social prac
tice; h ence the judgment of knowledge in relation to the
conditions of its production is in fact and by right a ques
tion for the theory of political praxis, that is, for Marxist
materialism as reworked by Louis Althusser and his
school. If Lecourt is right, then it must be admitted that
epistemologists are wrong. to attempt to reconstruct the
history of science without reference to the history of soci
ety. But is it possible to apply the name of "science" to a
type of theoretical production in which politics is ulti
mately determining, in which the old criteria of true and
false are replaced by the new criteria of fidelity to or devia
tion from a· party line? And if the epistemology of conti
nuity is illusory, how can the notion of an epistemological
break serve as the basis for a reinterpretation of Marxism
as the science of history in the name of which that episte
mology is rejected as illusory? 40
"
... ...... . �--

-
I8 Another young epistemologist, <Mich� 1 s��-;es,/raises a
-
different objection. The history of s�ienc�--ne s;ys, does
not exist: "Everyone talks about the history of science as
if it existed. But I don't know of any."41 There are histories
of geometry, optics, thermodynamics, and so on, histories
of isolated disciplines. But there will be no history of sci
ence until there is a global history of "the course of knowl
edge as such, not of its separate components." 42 Only
knowledge as a construct can be related to the other con
structs of general history. In Serres's view, the history of
science is the victim of a classification that it simply ac
cepts, whereas the real problem is to discover why that
classification exists, that is, to undertake a "critical history
of classifications." 43 To accept without criticism a division
of knowledge into disciplines prior to the "historical pro
cess" in which those disciplines develop is to succumb to
an "ideology." The use of these terms would seem to imply
a Marxist point of view, but the context is unclear.44 In any .
event, it should be noted that Bachelardian epistemology
confronted this problem well before anyone had thought
of accusing historians of ignoring it. The bulk of Bache
lard's Rationalisme applique is taken up with the question
of why there are "distinct regions in the rational orga
nization of knowledge" and with an analysis of the rela
tions between "regional rationalisms" and a "�ym;hetic
rationalism."
Cleady, the polemical texts just cited deserve less suc
cinct summary and less superficial examination. Neverthe.
less, I felt that it was right to mention them, because each
promises in its own way to establish a more fruitful rela
tionship between epistemology and the history of science
than that which obtains right now. Yet while critical of
statements of intention, which as I said earlier outnumber
concrete achievements, both of these texts are statements
of intention. Hence we must number them with the others,
while awaiting concrete results.
INTRODUCTION
19 Notes
I
Cf: J. F. Ferrier, Institutes of Metaphysics. The word epistemol
ogy was invented in order to have something to oppose to
ontology.
2
"The Origins of Classical Mechanics," in Marshal Clagett, ed.,
Critical Problems in the History of Science (Madison: 1959; 2nd
ed., 1962).
3
Institut de France, Aq..demie des Sciences, Troisieme centenaire,
z666-z966, vol. 2: Histoire de la botanique, Lucien Plantefol,
ed. (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1967).
4
Published in the proceedings of the Twelfth International Con-
gress on the History of Science, Paris, 1968, in the section entitled
"Colloques, textes des rapports" (Paris: Albin Michel, 1968), pp.
39-5 r .
5
Marcel Florkin, A History of Biochemistry (Amsterdam, London,
New York: Elsevier, 1972-1975 ). See especially the introduction,
"The Emergence of Biochemistry," pp. 1-20.
6
Ibid., part 3, p. 29 : "Kohler U. Hist. Biol., 5 (1972), 3 27) has
analysed the reception of Biichner's discovery by the scientific
circles of the time. He does not only take into account the intel
lectual aspects but also the social aspects. . . . As Kohler points
out, what Buchner provided was more than a fact or a theory; it
was the basis of a new conceptual system."
7
Ibid., pp. 19 1-193 .
8 ·
French title: L'Histoire du principe de relativite (Paris: Flamma
rion, 197 1 ) .
9
Italics mine.
IO
Tonnelat, L'Histoire, p. 1 3 .
lI
For example, Nobel prizewinner Fran�ois Jacob's La Logique du
vivant, une histoire de l'heredite (Paris: Gallimar�, 1 970) .
I2
Jean-Toussaint Desanti, La Philosophie silencieuse, o u Critique
des philosophies de la science (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).
THE ROLE O F EPISTEMOLOGY

20 13
Ibid., p. 108.
14
Discourse on Method, part 3.
15
Cf. Desanti, La Philosophie silencieuse, p . 17: "We know that
Kant was willing to get his hands dirty with mathematical phys
ics. But he was not like Newton, d'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, or
Laplace among those who made it. His relation to scientific work
was not as intimate as Leibniz's relation to mathematics or logic."
D. Grmek, in his Raisonnement experimental et recherche toxi
cologues chez Claude Bernard, has shown how to take advantage
of the opportunity to compare laboratory notes with notebooks
in which a scientist attempts a posteriori to rationalize his exper
imental methods.
16
See Gavin d e Beer, Charles Darwin: Evolution by Natural Selr.c
tion (London: 1963).
17
See Camille Limoges, La Selection naturelle. Limoges is director
·of the Institut d'Histoire et de Politique de la Science at the Uni
versity of Montreal.
18
An analogous remark could b e made about two studies of Pas
teur: Rene Dubos, Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science (London:
l9 5 I ), and Fran�ois Dagognet, Methodes et doctrine dans
l'oeuvre de Pasteur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1 9 67). A critical comparison of these two works and their histor
ical methods may be found in Nils Roll-Hansen, "Louis Pasteur:
A Case against Reductionist Historiography," Brit. ]. Phil. Sci.
23 ( r972):347-3 6 r .
19
See m y "Gaston Bachelard," .Scienteziati e technologici contem
poranei, vol. l, pp. 65-67. [Bachelard's work in the history of
science and epistemology is much better known in Europe than
in the United States, where his reputation is primarily as a literary
critic. Interested readers without French·may wish to consult my
translation of The New Scientific Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press,
19 8 5 ), which contains biographical and other information.
Trans.]
20'
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953·
2I
Le Materialisme rationnel, p. 8 6 ..
INTRODUCTION
21 22
See the paper of Anne Fagot, "Le 'transformisme' de Mauper
tuis," and my remarks in the ensuing discussion in Actes de la
]ournee Maupertuis, Creteil, 1 December 1973 (Paris: Vrin,
1975). E. Guyenot in Les Sciences de la vie aux XVIle et XVIIle
siecles (194 1 ) goes so far as to call Maupertuis " a geneticist" {p.
3 89).
23
Joseph T. Clark, "The Philosophy of Science and the History of
Science," Critical Problems in the History of Science (1959; 2nd
ed., 1962), pp. r n 3-1 40.
24
Ibid., pp. 1 5 3-1 61.
25
L'Activite rationaliste de la physique contemporaine (195 1), p. 3 .
See also L e Rationalisme applique (1949), p . n 2 : "Rational
ist thinking does not 'begin.' It corrects. It regularizes. It
normalizes. "
26
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1970) ; The Copernican Revolution
(New York: 195 7).
27
"Epistemologie et histoire des sciences," Archives de philosophie
3 7.4( 1974) . Father Russo frequently refers to the important work
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos
and Musgrave (Cambridge: 1970), in which Kuhn's ideas are dis
cussed at length and at times severely criticized by Lakatos, Karl
Popper, and Paul Feyerabend.
28
Jean Cavailles, Sur la logique et la theorie de la science, 3 rd ed.
(Paris: Vrin, 1976), p. 70.
29
Ibid., p. 7 8 .
30
I n French: fracture. The word, which i s t o b e compared with the
notions of an, epistemological break (rupture) or "tear" (dechi
rure) used by Bachelard, is borrowed from Je�.n Cavailles: " . . .
ces fractures d'independance successives qui chaque fois detach
ent sur l'anterieur le profil imperieux de ce qui vient apies neces
sairement et pour le depasser" (Sur la logique et la theorie de la
science, p. 28).
31
The response to Darwin in France has been studied from the

22 standpoint of critical epistemology by Yvette Conry, L'lntroduc
tion du darwinisme en France au XIXe siecle (Paris: Vrin, 1974).
32
See Alexandre Koyre, "Galilee et Platon," Etudes d'histoire de la
pensee scientifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1973 ), pp. 1 66-1 9 5 , and
Etudes galileennes (Paris: Hermann, 1 940) . At the beginning of
the latter work Koyre states that he borrowed the term mutation
from Bachelard. It is true that in Le Nouvel esprit scientifique
( 19 3 4) and La Philosophie du non ( 1 940) epistemological dis- ,
continuity is described using metaphors borrowed from biology.
This early Bachelardian vocabulary was eliminated in favor of ·
"epistemological break" in Le Rationalisme applique (1949 ) .

33
Maurice Clavelin, La Philosophie nature/le de Galilee (Paris: Ar-
mand Colin, 1968), confirms the validity of the Archimedean
model and challenges the usefulness of the Platonist affiliation.
34
Ludovico Geymonat, Galileo Galilei (Turin: Einaudi, 1 9 5 7) .
35
Koyre, Etudes galileennes, pp. 1 7 1-172.
36
On Duhem's epistemology and views on the history of science,
see the papers by Rene Poirier and Maurice Boudot in Les Etudes
philosophiques 22.4(1 967) .
37
L e Materialisme rationnel, p. 210.
38
Charles Singer, History of Biology: A General Introduction to the
Study of Living Things. The first edition dates from 193 1 .
39
Dominique Lecourt, L e four e t la nuit (Paris: Grasset, 1 974) .
40
[The author alludes to the fact that Althusser and his followers
borrowed from Bachelard the concept of an epistemological
break (under the name coupure rather than rupture) and used it
as a key element in their reinterpretation of Marx's thought.
Trans.]
4r
Michel Serres, "Les Sciences," in J. Le Goff and P. Nora, eds.,
Faire de l'histoire, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, r974), pp. 203-228.
42
Ibid., p. 204.
43
In his _study of Auguste Comte in Histoire de/a philosophie 3
INTRODUCTION
23 · (Paris: Gallimard, 1974) Serres voices the same regret about the
nonexistence of a critical study of classifications. But such a study
does exist, and what is regrettable is that it is not more widely
known. It is the work of Robert Pages, who is director of the
Laboratory for Social Psychology, and is entitled Problemes de
classification culturelle et documentaire (Paris: Editions docu
mentaires industrielles et techniques, l 9 5 5 ) .
44
The suspicion of Marxist influence is reinforced by a passage in
Serres's Esthetiques sur Carpaccio (Paris: Hermann, 1975). After
denouncing the "foolish project of describing what is going on
inside the knowing subject," Serres adds, "Who told you? What
did you see? Tell me where to go to see it. The conditional is a
counterfactual. The conditions of possibility are here and there,
not-inside this fairy castle, this utopia. It was Kant and the critical
project, Kant and the conditional field, that Marx set on his fe�t,
established at last on an identifiable earth. Marxism is an ex
ample of a successful criticism, which precludes dreams of Prince
Charmjng" {pp. 86-88).
THE ROLE O F EPISTEMOLOGY

I Scientific and Medical Ideologies in the
Nineteenth Century
I What Is a Scientific Ideology?
What is a scientific ideology? This is a question that arises,

or so -It seems to-me, in the practice of the history of sci
ence, and its answer may be of importa�ce for the theory
of that subject. Perhaps the first question to ask is what it
is that the history of science claims to be the history of. An
easy answer is that the history of science is the history of a
certain cultural form called "science." One must the_!! spec
ify precisely what criteria make it -possible to decide
whether or not, at any given time, a particular practice or
discipline merits the name science. And it is precisely a
question of merit, for "science" is a kind of title, a dignity
not to be bestowed lightly. Hence another question be
comes inevitable: Should the history of science exclude or,
on the contrary, should it tolerate or even include the his
tory of the banishment of inauthentic knowledg� from the
realm of authentic science? I use the word banishment
quite intentionally, for what is at stake is nothing less than
the legal withdrawal of legitimately acquired privileges.
We have long since ceased to believe as Voltaire believed,
that superstitions and false beliefs were invented by cynical
dervishes and foisted upon the innocent by ignorant
nursemaids.1
28 Obviously this is more than a question of historical
method or technique concerning what can be learned
about the past of science from documents and archives. It
is really an epistemological problem concerning the way in
which scientific knowledge is historically constituted.
Professor Suchodolski has recently posed a similar
question: "If the whole history of science up to the present
time were in fact the history of 'antiscience,' that would no
doubt prove that it could not have been otherwise and
probably that it will not be otherwise in the future. . . . The
history of science as a history of truth cannot be written.
It is an oxymoron." 2 I shall have more to say about the
concept of "antiscience." In particular, I shall examine the
extent to which it coincides with what might be meant by
. the word ideology.
The question of ideology arises, as I said, in connec
tion with the practice of the history of science, although
many practicing historians have never bothered to ask it.
Surprisingly, those who have asked have been vague about
the criteria by which ideology is defined. IBew historians of
mathematics, for instance, have looked � the magical or
mystical. properties of numbers and shapes as part of their
subject.J Historians of astronomy do pay some attention to
astrology, despite the fact that Copernicus in r 543 ex-
ploded the . specious foundations of "horoscopic science."
But they do so only because astronomers were indebted to
astrologers for several centuries' observation of the heav-
. ens. Many historians of chemistry are aware of the history
of ·alchemy and regard alch:emy as a '·' stage" in the incep
tfon of chemical science. (ffistorians of human sciences
such as psychology find the past of their subject more em
barrassing. Two-thirds . of Brett's history of psychology is
· devoted to theories of the soul, consciousness, and life of
�)
the spirit, many of which predate the very term psychology
and, a fortiori, the modern concept associated with i
.
SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

29 . II
Is the notion of scientific ideology relevant? Is the term a

suitable one to designate and properly delimit the whole
range of discursive structures claiming to be theories, the
whole variety of more or less consistent representations of
interphe11:omenal relations, and the whole spectrum of
more or less permanent structures in terms of which men
have 1.nterp�eted their everyday experience? In short, is it a
useful way of denoting those pseudosciences whose falsity
is revealed solely by the fact that a genuine science has been
established to refute their claims?
There is no mystery about the reasons for the wide
spread use of the word ideology today. It stems from the
vulgarization of Karl Marx's thought. Ideology is an epis
temological concept with a polemical function, applied to
systems of representation that express themselves in the
languages of politics, ethics, religion, and metaphysics.
These languages claim to express things a s they are,
whereas in reality they are means of protecting and defend
ing ·a _situation, that is, a particular structure of the rela
tions between men and things. Marx attacked ideology in
the name of the science that he claimed to be instituting:
the science of men making thei.r own history, though not
necessarily the history they wished to be making.
Marx borrowed the term ideology from eighteenth
century French philosophy. Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy
defined it as the science of the genesis of ideas. The ideo
logues, as their followers were called, proposed treating
ideas as natural phenomena determined by the relation be
tween man, a living, sensitive organism, and his natural
environment. Positivists before the fact, the ideologues
were nevertheless liberals, opponents of the theologians
and metaphysicians of their day. At first these liberals were
deceived by Napoleon's political maneuvers; they believed
SCIENTIFIC IDEOLOGY
him to be the heir of the French Revolution. But when they
turned against him, Napoleon heaped scorn and irony
upon their heads, and it was he who was responsible for
distorting their public image.3 Ideology was denounced in
the name of political realism (according to which laws
were to be based on knowledge of the human heart and the
lessons of history) as mere metaphysics, thought without
content.
In the meaning that Marx gave to the term, he pre
served the idea that ideology inverts the relation between
knowledge and the thing known. Ideology, which initially
denoted the natural science of man's acquisition of ideas
about reality, came to be a term applied to any system of
ideas resulting from a situation in which men were pre
vented from understanding their true relation to reality.
Ideology exists, according to Marx, wherever attention is
diverted from its proper object.
Can the notion of scientific ideology be subsumed
without distortiqn under the general notion of ideology in
the Marxist sense? At first sight, the answer is no� In The
German Ideology Marx draws a sharp contrast between
political, legal, economic, and religious ideologies and eco
nomic science, by which he meant the economic science
that he intended to institute. Science authenticates itself, he
argued, by tearing the veil that is ideology's only substance.
t!enc�. s.�!��tHic ide.ol()gy is a c:_ont_radiction . in terms. By
.
d�fi�ition, every ideology stands at a distaiice f�'Om r��lity;
every ideology fails to touch the true object that it believes
it is examining. Marx sets out to prove that, compared
with the Marxist science of economics, all political and
economic ideologies are determined by the class position
of the bourgeois intellectual, who thinks that he is looking
at the reflection of things themselves as in a mirror when
in fact all he sees is an inverted image of man's relation to
other men and to nature. No ideology speaks the truth._
Afthcmgh some are_ less removed from reality than others,

3I all_ are illusory.4 And by illusory he means not simply mis
�aken but also comforting: ideologies are reassuring fables,
unconsciously complicit in a judgment determined by self
interest.5 In short, Marx holds that ideology performs a
compensatory function. Bourgeois ideologies are reactions,
symptoms of social conflict and class struggle, yet as theo
ries they are wont to deny the concrete problems without
which they would not exist.
But, ' someone will rightly object, is it not noteworthy
that Marx never counts science among the ideologies dis
cussed in The German Ideology? It is indeed. To be sure,
in his critique of Feuerbach, Marx charges that the philos
opher failed to understand that so-called pure science takes
its aims and its means from commerce and industry, or, in
other words, from man's material activity. But does this
imply that there is no difference in epistemological status
between, say, liberal political economy, which for Marx is
an ideological discourse, and such well-tested theories as
electromagnetism or celestial mechanics? It is quite true
that the development of astronomy in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries depended on the fabrication of optical
and chronometric instruments. In the eighteenth century,
the determination of. longitude on the high seas was a theo
retical issue, but the theory in question drew upon the
clockmaker's art to develop a commercially valuable tech
nology. Today, however, the celestial mechanics of Newton
is being confirmed experimentally on a grand scale through
space programs supported by technolo,g��s and economies
informed by quite different ideologies. To say that the sci
ence of nature is not independent of the mode of produc
tion and exploitation of nature is not to say that the
problems and methods of science are not autonomous; un
like economic or political theory, science is not thereby
subordinated to the dominant ideology of the ruling class
at a particular moment in the history of society. In his Cri
tique of Political Economy Marx encountered what he
SCIENTIFIC IDEOLOGY
32 termed a "difficulty," namely, that art, though produced
under specific social conditions, could maintain its value ,
even after those conditions had disappeared. Can Marxism
refuse to Greek geometry what Marx granted to Greek art?
Yet even if scientific knowledge cannot be placed
under the head of ideology, is there any reason why we
cannot give a meaning to the concept of scientific ideology?
In the category of ideology a distinction needs to be made
between content and function. Marx explicitly states that
ideologies will cease to exist when the class whose destiny
is to abolish all classes has accomplished its dialectical mis
sion. The function of ideology-to delude-will no longer
exist. Of course Marx is assuming that his description of
the pacified, classless society is correct. History continues,
however, after this stage is reached, and one might even
say that it just begins. It is now the history not of cl_ass
struggle but of man's relation to nature. A new question
then arises. Can one predict the development of man's new
relation to nature? In other words, can one foresee a tran
quil and orderly future for the history of science? Or will
the production of new scientific knowledge in the future
require, as it has required in the past, lucky discoveries that
can be rationally exploited only after they have been
made? In order to establish man's new relation to nature,
will not men have to go beyond what is already known and
verified? If so, then scientific ideology would be both an
obstructio� to and a necessary preconditi<;>n of p�ogr�ss:
The history of science would need to include a history of
scientific ideologies, explicitly recognized as such. Let me
therefore try to show the usefulness of the concept.
III
Scientific ideology, unlike a political class ideology, .is_nqt

false consciousness. Nor is it false science. The essence of

33 · false science is that it never encounters falsehood, never
renounces anythii1g, and never has to change its language.
For a false science there is no prescientific state . . The asser
tions of a false science can never be falsified. Hence false
science has no history. By contrast, a scientific ideology
does have a history. A scientific ideology comes to an end
when the place that it occupied in the encyclopedia of
knowledge is taken over by a discipline that operationally
demonstrates the validity of its claim to scientific status, its
"norms of scientificity." At that point a certain form of
nonscience is excluded from the domain of science. I say
nonscience rather than use Suchodolski's term "antisci
ence" simply in order to take note of the fact that in a
scientific ideology there is an explicit ambition to be sci
ence, in imitation of some already constituted model of
what science is. This is � crucial point. The existence of.
scientific ideologies implies the parallel and prior existence
Of scientific discourses. Hence it also presupposes that a
d�tinctjon has already been made between science and
religion.
Consider the case of atomism. Democritus, Epicurus,
and Lucretius claimed scientific status for their pltysics and /
psychology. To the antiscience of religion they opposed

the antireligion of science. Scientific ideology neglects the
methodological requirements and operational possibilities
of science in tlie realm of experience that it chooses to ex
plore, but it is not . ignorance a11.d it does not scorn or re
pudiate the function of science. lfence scientific ideology is
''
by no means the same thing as superstition, for ideology
has its place, possibly usurped, in the realm of knowledge,
not in the realm of religious belief. Nor is it superstition in
the strict etymological sense. A superstition is a belief from
an old religion that persists despite its prohibition by a new .
religion. Scientific ideology does indeed stand over (super
stare) a site that will eventually be occupied by science. But
science is not merely overlain; it is pushed aside (d�por-
SCIENTIFIC IDEOLOGY
34 tare) by ideology. Therefore, when science eventually sup
plants ideology, it is not in the expected location. Whe�
chemistry and physics established scientific knowledge of
the atom in the nineteenth century, the place of the atom
was not the one assigned to it in atomistic ideology: the
place of the indivisible. What science finds is not what id�
ology suggested looking for. The persistence of the word
proves nothing when the context and methods differ as
much as the technique of pulverization differs from the
methods of modern atomic research. Indeed, what the ide
ology heralded as simple reveals in its scientific reality a
hierarchy of complexitie�.
For another, I hope convincing, example of the way in
which scientific ideologies are supplanted by science, con
sider the Mendelian theory of heredity. Most historians of
biology believe that Maupertuis was the forerunner of
moderngenetics because in his Venus physique he consid
ered diEfuechanisms by which normal and abnormal traits
are transmitted, he used the calculus of probabilities to de
cide whether the frequency of a particular abnormality
within a particular family was or was not fortuitous, and
he explained hybridization by assuming the existence of
seminal atoms, hereditary elements that combined during
copulation. But it is enough to compare the writings of
Maupertuis and Mendel to see the magnitude of the ·gap
between a science and the ideology that it replaces. The
facts that Mendel studies are not those gleaned by a casual
observer; they are obtained through systematic research.
That research was dictated by the nature of Mendel's prob
lem, for which there is no precedent in the pre-Mendelian
literature. Mendel invented the idea of a character, by
which he meant not the elementary agent of hereditary
transmission but the element of heredity itself. A Men
delian character could enter into combination with n other
characters, and one could measure the frequency of its ap
pearance in successive generations. Mendel was not inter-

35 · ested in structure, fertilization, or development. For him,
hybridization was not a way of establishing the constancy
or inconstancy of a global type; it was a way of decompos
ing a type, an instrument of analysis, a tool for separating
characters that made it necessary to work with large
samples. Hence Mendel was interested in hybrids despite
his repudiation of an age-old tradition of hybrid research.
He was not interested in sexuality or in the controversy
over innate versus acquired traits or of preformation versus
epigenesis. He was interested only in verifying his hypoth
esis via the calculation of combinations. 6 Mendel neglected
everything that interested those who in reality were not his
predecessors at all. The seventeenth-century ideology of
hereditary transmission is replete with obserVations of an
imal and plant hybrids and monsters. Such curiosity served
several purposes. It supported one side or the other in the
debates between preformationists and epigenesists, ovists
and animalculists. As a result, it was useful in resolving
legal questions concerning the subordination of the sexes,
paternity, purity of blood lines, and the legitimacy of the
aristocracy. These concerns were not unrelated to the con-.
troversy ·between innatism and sensualism. The technology
of hybridization was perfected by agronomists in search of
advantageous varieties as well as by botanists interested in
the relations between species. Only by isolating Mauper
tuis's Venus physique from its context can it be compared
with the Versuche uber Pflanzenhybriden. Mendel's science
is not the end point of a trail that can be traced back to the
ideology it replaced, for the simple reason that that ideol
ogy follow�d not one but several trails, and none was a
course set by science itself. All were rather legacies of var
ious traditions, some old, others more recent. Ovism and
animalculism were not of the same age as the empirical and
mythological arguments advanced in favor of aristocracy.
The ideology of heredity7 was excessively and naively am
bitious. It sought to resolve a number of important theo-
SCIEiNTlfIC,IDEOL0GY
36 retical and practical legal problems without having
examined their foundations. Here the ideology simply
withered away by attrition. But the elimination of its scien
tific underpinnings brought it into focus as an ideology.
The characterization of a . certain set of observations and
deductions as an ideology came after the disqualification
of its claim to be a science; this was accomplished by the
development of a new discourse, which circumscribed its
field of validity and proved itself through the consistency
of its results.
Instructive as it is to study the way in whic� s_�iW_ti1i c
ideologies disappear, it is even more .instructive to study
how they appear. Consider briefly the genesis of a nine
teenth-century scientific ideology, evolutionism. The work
of Herbert Spencer makes an interesting case study. Spen
cer believed that he could state a universally valid law of
progress in terms of evolution from the simple to the com
plex through successive differentiations. Everything, in
other words, evolves from more to less homogeneity and
from lesser to greater individuation: the .solar system, the
animal organism, living species, man, society, and · the
products of human thought and activity, including lan
guage. Spencer explicitly states that he derive� this law of
evolution by · generalizing the principles of embryology
contained in Karl-Ernst von Baer's Uber Entwickelungs
geschichte der Thiere ( 1 8 28). The publication of the Origin
of Species in 1 8 5 9 confirmed Spencer's conviction that his
generalized theory of evolution shared the scientific valid
ity of Darwin's biology. But he also claimed for his law of
evolution the support of a science more firmly established
than the new biology, claiming to have deduced the phe
nomenon of evolution from the law of conservation of en
ergy, which he maintained could be used to . prove that
homogeneous states are unstable. If one follows the devel
opment of Spencer's work, it seems clear that he used von .
Baer's _and, later, D arwin's biology to lend scientific sup-

37 port to his views concerning social engineering in nine
teenth-century English industrial society, in particular, his
advocacy of free enterprise, political individualism, and
competition. From the law of differentiation he deduced
that the individual must be supported against the state. But
perhaps this "deduction" was contained in the principles
of the Spencerian system from the very beginning.
The laws of mechanics, embryology, and evolution
cannot validly be extended beyond the domainproper to
each of these sciences. To what end are specific theoretical
·conclusions severed from their premises and applied out of
context to human experience in general, particularly social
experience? To a practical end. Evolutionist ideology was
used to justify industrial society as against traditional so
ciety on the one hand and the demands of workers on the
other. It was in part antitheological, in part antisocialist.
Thus evolutionist ideology was an ideology in the Marxist
"
��nse: a representation of nature or S<?ciety whos� truth i�y
not in what it said but in what it hid. Of course evolution
ism was far broader than Spencer's ideology. But Spencer's
views had a lasting influence on linguists and anthropolo
gists. His ideology gave meaning to the word primitive and
salved the conscience of colonialists. A remnant of its leg- .
acy can still be found in the behavior of advanced societies
toward. so-called underdeveloped count.ries, even though
anthropology has long since recognized the plurality of
cultures, presumably making it illegitimate for any one cul
ture to set itself up as the yardstick by which all others are
. measured. In freeing th�mselves from their evolutionist ori
gins, contemporary linguistics, ethnology, and sociology
have shown that an ideology disappears when historical
conditions cease to be compatible with its existence. The
theory of evolution has changed since Darwin, but Dar
winism is an integral part of the history of the science of
evolution. By contrast, evolutionist ideology is merely an
} i
�10perative residue in the history of the human sciences.
SCIENTIFIC IDEOLOGY
With these examples I hope that I have clarified the way in
which scientific ideologies come into being. Let me add
that one.must be carefol not to confuse scientific icl�ol.Qgies
-
with th-;; i d�� logies of scientists, by which I m�an ideolo
gies that scientists engender when they attempt to system
atize their research methods and procedures or when they
_talk about the place of science within the larger culture.
· The ideol9gies of scientists should perhaps be called ide
ologies of philosophers, that is, scientific-sounding doc
trines propounded by men who in this realm are scientists
only in a presumptive or presumptuous sense. In the eigh
teenth century the concepts of Nature and Experience were
ideological concepts of scientists. By contrast, the concepts
of "organic molecule" (Buffon) and "chain of being" (Bon
net) were concepts of scientific ideology in natural history. ·,
To sum up:
a. Scientific ideologies are explanatory systems that stray
beyond their own borrowed norms of scientificity.
b. In every domain scientific ideology precedes the insti
tution of science. Similarly, every ideology is preceded by
a science in an adjunct domain that falls obliquely within
the ideology's field of view.
c. Scientific ideology is not to be confused with false sci
ence, magic, or religion. Like them, it derives its impetus
from an unconscious need for direct access to the totality
of being, but it is a belief that squints at an already insti
tuted science whose prestige it recognizes and whose style
it seeks to imitate.
Let me conclude by going back to where I began to
propose a theory that .may shed some light on the practice
of the history of science. A history of science that views
science as a series of articulated truths need not concern·

39 · its�lf with ideology. Historians of science who hold this
v:iew naturally leave questions of ideology to the historians
of ideas or, worse still, the philosophers.
A history of science that views science as a progressive
process of purification governed by norms of verification
cannot fail to concern itself with scientific ideology. Gaston
Bachelard 'distinguished between obsolete and valid sci
ence, and while it is wise tQ_�ar�te one from the-9ther, it
is also wise to study how the two are related'i'.fhe obsolete
is condemned in the name of truth and objectivity. But
what is now obsolete was once considered objectively true.
Truth must submit ittelf to criticism and possible refuta
tion or there is no science.
Distinguishing between iq�ology and scien.�e prc;_:vents
us from seeing continuities where in fact there are only ele
-
ments of ideology preserved in .a science that has sup
planted a!l_ earlier ideology. Hence such a distinction
prevents us from seeing anticipations of the Origin of Spe
cies in Rousseau's Dream of d'Alembert.
Conversely, recognizing the connections between ide
ology and science should prevent us from reducing the his
tory of science to a featureless landscape, a map without
relief.
The historian of science must work and must present
his work on two levels. If he fails to recognize and incor
porate scientific ideology into his work, he runs the risk of
producing nothing more than ideology himself, by which I
mean in this instance a history that is a false consciousness
of its object. The closer the historian �!!inks_.he_�QJJle.s to
his obje.£�,_!!ie farther he is from the t::gg�t. His knowledge
is false knowledge, because true critical knowledge re
quires critical perspective; the historian cannot accurately
see any object that he does not actively construct. Ideology
is mistaken belief in being close to truth. Critical knowl
edge knows that it stands at a distance from an operation-
SCIENTIFIC IDEOLOGY
40 ally constructed object. Professor Suchodolski is righL01
one point: the history of truth is a contradiction in terms.
Notes
I
See Voltaire, "Prejudice," in the Philosophical Dictionary.

2
Report entitled "Factors Affecting the Development of the His

tory of Science," XIIe Congres International d'Histoire des Sci
ences: Colloques, textes des rapports (Paris: 1968), p. 34.
3
"The contempt that [Napoleon] professed for industrial men o
affairs complemented his contempt for the ideologues" (Marx
The Holy Family, 6.3 .c) .
4
In Marx's view, the political ideologies of the French and Englisl
in the eighteenth century were less remote from their true basei
than the religious ideology of the Germans.
5
In the Communist Manifesto the illusion of the bourg<:;oisie thai
the social situation that makes it the dominant class is eternal ii
characterized as a "self-interested conception."
6
Jacques Piquemal, "Aspects de la pensee de Mendel," lecture de·
livered at the Palais de la Decouverte in Paris, 1965.
7
In this case the name of the science was transferred post hoc t<J
the ideology; in the case of atomism it was the other way around.
I '
I

2 John Brown's System: An Example of Medical
Idef? logy
It is · hard to account tod�y for the contemporary success

of the medical theory of John Brown ( 17 3 5-17 8 8). Simply
reading ·his Elements of Medicine (·1 780), with its num
bered paragraphs in imitation of a geometry textbook, it is
difficult .to imagine · how the �heory of organic incitability,
which was not much appreciated . in . England except by
Erasmus D.arwin, could J 1aye reached Benjamin Rush in
Philadelphia, caused a stir in the universities of Pavia and
Milan, and excited German physicians and philosophers of
the romantic period.
Georges Cuvier gives wh�t I think is a convincing ac
count of the reasons for Brownisfl?-'s favor in Germany and
Italy as �ell as for its ultimate abandonment. He begins by
noting that, before Brown, the best that physicians could
do was to organize their observations of a patient into a
history of his disease, on the basis of which they then for
mulated prognoses according to a loose set of analogies.
If these analogies could be raised to a level of generality
such that there emerged from them a _principle applicable
to all cases', one had what was called a medical theory. Yet
in spite of centuries of effort by men of genius who prac
ticed medicin�, none of the doctrines put forth as medical
theories was able to win lasting assent. Young men rallied
42 enthusiastically to each new theory, for theory promised to
shorten their studies and guide them through an almost
impenetrable labyrinth. But the briefest experience left
them disillusioned.
The theories of Stahl, Hoffman, Boerhaave, Cullen,
and Brown will always be regarded as efforts by men of
superior intellect. They do honor to the memory of their
authors by showing the extent of the subject matter that
their genius could embrace. But there is no point in looking
to them as certain guides to the practice of the art of
medicine.
Brown's theory richly deserved the kind of success that
I have described, owing to its extreme simplicity and to
certain beneficial changes in practice that it instituted. It
seemed to reduce the medical art to a small number of for
mulas: that life is a kind of combat between the living or
ganism and external agents; that vital force is dispensed in
fixed quantities and the organism's term of life is deter
mined by the rate of its consumption, although life can be
snuffed out by an overabundance of vital force as easily as
by its exhaustion; that attention should be focused on the
intensity of vital action rather than on such modifications
as it may be supposed to undergo; and that diseases· and
medications may be classified into two groups, depending
on whether they stimulate or impede vital action. Thanks
to these simple ideas, Brown's doctrine enjoyed great, not
to say impassioned, support for a time in Germany and
Italy. But today its ingenious aspects can no longer conceal
its inadequacies, such as its exclusion of the state of the
organs and neglect of the great variety of external causes
that may influence the alterations of internal functions.
More or less the same thing can be said about the mod
ifications that such physicians as Messrs. Roschlaub, Jo
seph Frank, and others have attempted to make in the
system, thereby giving rise to any number of other systems
classed under the general rubric of "theories of incitation."
As for more recent attempts in Germany by propo
nents of what is known in that country as the "philosophy ..
of nature," what I have already said abo.ut their physiology
will give some idea of their content. The point of view of
these philosophers is so elevated that details inevilably es-

43 · cape them, and the practice of medicine is nothing but de
t�ils and exceptions. Accordingly, they appear to have
achieved only a temporary influence on the exercise of
the art.1
After Cuvier, but not necessarily following his lead,
several historians, as if taking literally Weikard's sarcasms
about the time traditionally wasted in teaching and learn
ing "all those philosophical, pathological, semiotic, thera
peutic, and chemical minutiae, " 2 attempted to explain
Brown's success as a result of the simplification that his
theory brought to the practice of medicine, which it re
duced to just two therapeutic acts, one the inverse of the
other: stimulation and debilitation. The distinction be
tween two diatheses and two classes of disease, sthenic and
asthenic, undermined all existing nosologies, yet paradox
ically, the dearth of therapeutic possibilities led to an en
largement of the pharacopoeia. Empirical research aimed
at discovering a variety of substances with the same effect
or with opposite effects depending on dosage and circum
stances was one of the consequences of stimulism as well
as of Rasori's counterstimulism. But the rules for applying
these various inciting agents were contained in just two
words. Some �ontemporaries compared Brown to the an
cient methodist physicians. Where Thessalus of Tralles
boasted ·of teaching medicine, according to Galen, in six
months, Ritter tells us that in 1 798 a physician could be
trained under Brown's system in just four weeks.
Other historians point out that the success of the new
general pathology was due in part to its historic encounter
on the continent with a new philosophical physiology. It
was thanks to Galvani, Volta, and animal galvanism that
Brown appealed to the Italians,3 and it was thanks to
Messmer and animal magnetism that he met with such en
thusiasm in Germany. It took no less a figure than Schell
ing, with the assistance of Roschlaub (1768-1 8 3 5), to
MEDICAL IDEOLOGY
44 establish Brown among the Germans. Roschlaul
Erregunstheorie4 introduced into medicine the theory th;
organic and inorganic nature are identical, as well as t1
assertion that excitability is the organic analog of cosm
magnetism. 5 Furthermore, as has been noted by Wernc
Leibbrand, the historian of medicine in the romantic pt
riod on which Brown had such an important influence, tt.
time was ripe for a physiology of excitability in the la1
eighteenth century, because the literature of the perioc
from Goethe's Werther to Novalis's Hymns to the Nigh
was rich in metaphors for sensibility. By developing th
concept of asthenia and classifying most diseases as a�
thenic, Brown gave medical grounds for the languid sigh
of literary heroes.
Beddoes has said of Brown that his medical eruditio:
was limited. From the teaching of William Cullen (1712·
1 790), the inventor of �he concept of neurosis, he took th
idea that the nervous system is the source of vitality, tha
· the nervous fluid is susceptible to different degrees of mo
bility, called excitation and collapsus, and that nearly a]
human diseases are diseases of the nerves. 6
The history of the concept of irritation and ir�it�bilit;
from Glisson ( 1 597-'1677) to Broussais has been examinec
by a number of historians, including Charles Daremberg
Henri Marion, Emile Gley, and Owsei Temkin. Their worl
has revealed how such concepts as incitation, excitation
.
and stimulus were shaped and applied in the early stagei
of neurophysiology and sensory psychophysiology. Haller
however, limited the notion of irritability to a specific
property of the muscles, whereas Bichat restricted its ap·
plication to animal tissue in a manner determined by th<:
tissue structure, leading to some confusion in the medical
i ;
literature. 7 Brown, by continuing the mechanistic tradition
of Hoffman to which Cullen subscribed, .reverted, prob
ably unwittingly, to the simple equivalence th'1t Glisson
II
;f
i
45 had established between irritare, incitare, exstimulare, and
vigorare (Anatomia hepatis, 1654). In asserting that every
organism possesses a finite quantity of incitability, or ca
pacity to be affected by inciting powers or stimuli, he did
�
not trouble himself to provide either justification or evi
dence but simply set forth a principle by which life was
distinguished from inert matter. Leibbrand quite a y in
sisted that it was a question of an "axiomatic force.' .Using
this axiom Brown reduced all living things and vita phe
nomena to one: the animal and the vegetal are the same
(par. 9 and par. 3 1 8), agriculture and medicine are the
same (par. 2), nerves and muscles are the same (par. 48),
health and sickness are the same (par. 65). "The same pow
ers produce all the phenomena of life" (par. no). "Every
thing in nature is the work of a single organ" (par. 3 27).
"Nature has not placed life and health under the jurisdic
tion of powers different from those that preside over dis
J
ease and death" (par. 3 28) Thus Brown could describe
himself as the Newton of medicine (par. 244 note and par.
3 28), the first to endow medical theory with the certainty
of a true science (par. 3 l 2).
France was the country in which Brown's doctrine en
joyed the least success among physicians. It was more suc
cessful among · chemists, including Fourcroy. To explain
these facts, some scholars have argued that the physicians
of the revolutionary era were devoted to the method
of clinical observation, whereas Brown maintained that
"symptoms never have anything positive to say and teach
us nothing" (par. 661 ; see also par. 23 4 note and par. 504).
French doctors were faithful to nosographic classification
and influenced by the prepositivist medical ideology set
forth by Cabanis. Unlike Germany, where Weikard, con
sulting physician to Empress Catherine, had published a
summary of Brown's doctrine before publishing a transla
tion of his Elements in 1 796, French physicians did not
MEDICAL IDEOLOGY
46 possess a complete text until r 80 5 , when Fouquier, Bertin,
and Lafont-Gouzi provided simultaneous translations. Be
fore that the medical profession had had to rely on abridg
ments or summaries nearly all obtained by military doctors
attached to the armies commanded by Bonaparte in north
ern Italy. Thus Italy, conquered by Brown, converted its
conquerors to Brownism. But the Ecole de Medecine of
Paris was not conquered by the Military Health Service.
' This account seems to me to miss a crucial point, how
ever. French medical schools in Paris and Montpellier were
simply not prepared to accept Brown's teaching owing to
their general �oncept of vital phenomena. Leibbrand saw
(but stated only in passing) that the obstacle lay in vital
ism. In paragraph 72 of the Elements Brown wrote, "Based
on all that I have said up to now, life is not a natural but a
forced state.8 At every moment living things are moving
toward destruction. They preserve themselves only with
difficulty, for little time and with the help of fore.ign pow
ers, and in the end they die by succumbing to fatal neces
sity" (cf. par. 3 28). And he asks, "Will we forget the
fundamental principle of this doctrine, which establishes
that we are nothing by ourselves and are wholly subordi
nate to extreme powers ?" (par. 609). It is not hard to imag
ine the reaction that such statements' would have elicited
from physicians who, through the influence of the School
of Montpellier, maintained some affinity with Stahlianism,
with the distinction between the mixed and the living, and
with the idea that the soul is the principle of life, which
protects the integrity of the organism against dissociation
and corruption of its chemical constituents, and, a fortiori,
from those whom Bichat had just taught that life was noth
ing other than a set of functions that resisted death. Brown
�
anticipated the opposition to Bicha Long before l\ichat,
Brown had exhorted his followers to "open cadavers" 9
(par. 84), and he had not needed pathological anatomy
(which he practiced very little, despite his admiration for

47 Morgagni) to teach him the lessons that Bichat learned by
di�tinguishing the specific vital reactions of different kinds
of tissue. Brown boasted that he was the first physician to
treat "the human body as a whole" (par. 23 2 note and par.
3 05 note). The very notion of consensus partium struck
him as still too analytical. He admired Sydenham, but not
without reproach: "He had no idea of the science of the
living organism considered as a whole and as a proper ob
ject of medicine" (par. 406 note). Finally, his refusal to ac
knowledge in either plants or animals any mode of life
other than stimulation of incitability (par. 3 27) would have
prevented him from accepting the celebrated distinction
between vegetative life and animal life set forth in the Re
cherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort.
To understand how the Elements of Medicine could
have displeased the French while pleasing the German ro
mantics, who admired the work for its ideas of totality and
polarity (the latter in the conflict between stimulation and
weakness), we must pause long enough·to give a brief sum
mary of the theory of life upon which Brown's medical
practice was based. Charles Daremberg wrote that in
France "Brown was soon eclipsed by Broussais." 10 Al
though Broussais saw irritation as the cause of disease
whereas Brown saw stimulation as the remedy, � oth I_ll�
shared · an intense conviction that normal and pathological ·
organic phenomena are fundamentally identical.11 This
principle, which abolished the distinction between pathol
ogy and physiology, was accepted by Magendie, Auguste
. Comte, and Claude Bernard. For Bernard and others, it
became the basis of an ideology, that of medicine's unlim
ited power, a medical ideology free of every vestige of Hip
pocratism.12 Thus John Brown's commandment found an
echo in the nineteenth century: "One must either stimulate
or debilitate. Inaction is never correct. Do not trust in the
powers of nature" (par. 9 5 ; cf. par. 59 8 note).
MEDICAL IDEOLOGY
48 Bibliography
Beddoes, Thomas. Observations on the Character and Writings
of john Brown. London: 1 79 5 ·
Brown, John. Elements o f Medicine. Translated from the original
Latin by Fouquier. Paris: Demonville-Gabon, 1 805.
Daremberg, Charles. Histoire des sciences medicates. Paris: Bail
liere, 1 870, pp. 650-672, no2-n 56.
Gley, Emile. "L'lrritabilite," in the Dictionnaire encyclopedique
des sciences medicates, 4th series, vol. 16 ( 1 889). Reprinted in
Essais de philosophie et d'histoire de la biologie. Paris: Masson,
1900, PP· l - 8 6.
Leibbrand, Werner. Die speculative Medizin der Romantik. Ha
burg: Claasen Verlag, l 9 5 6.
Marion, Henri. "Francis Glisson," Revue philosophique (August
1 8 82): 1 21-1 5 5 .
Risse, Giinter B. "The Quest for Certainty in Medicine: John
Brown's System of Medicine in France," Bulletin of the History
of Medicine 4 5 ( 1 970) .
Risse, Giinter B. "The Brownian System of Medicine: Its Theo
retical and Practical Implications," Clio medica 5 ( 1970) .
Rossi, Ennio. " Giovanni Rasori ( 1 766-1 8 3 7), or Italian Medi
cine in Transition," Bulletin of the History ofMedicine 29 (195 5 ).
Temkin, Owsei. "The Classical Roots of Glisson's Doctrine of
Irritation," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 3 8 (1964).
Tilliette, Xavier. Schelling. Une philosophie en devenir, vol. r.
Paris: Vrin, 1970.

Weikard. Doctrine medicate simplifiee, ou Eclaircissement et
confirmation du nouveau systeme de medecine de Brown, with
notes by Joseph Frank. Translated from the Italian by Rene-
·
Joseph Bertin. Paris: Barrois, 1 79 8 .
Notes
l
Georges Cuvier, Histoire des progres des sciences naturelles de

puis I789 jusqu'a ce jour, vol. l (Paris: Roret, 1 8 34), pp. 3 1 3 -
3 1 6.
2
Preface to the Doctrine medicate simplifiee, OU Eclaircissq,rzent et
confirmation du nouveau systeme de medecine de Brown, trans
lated from the Italian by R.-J. Bertin (Paris: Th. Barrois, 179 8),
p. xlviii.

49 3
Brown is mentioned twice in Frederick-Alexander von Hum-
boldt's Experiments in Galvanism .Jn the French translation by
.
Jadelot (Paris: I 799), see pp. 9, 2I9.

4
Untersuchungen ii.her die Pathogenie, I798-I 800.
5 .
Se'e Schelling, Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphiloso-
phie, I 799·
6
"Based on what I have just said about the excitation and collap
sus of the brain, it should be dear that I am assuming that life,
insofar as it is corporeal, consists in the excitation of the nervous
system, and especially of the brain that joins its various parts into
one whol'� But certain other bodily functions are necessary to
sustain this excitation. Hence the causes of death may be of two
kinds. One acts directly on the nervous system, destroying its ex
citation. The other produces the same effect indirectly, by de
stroying the organs and functions necessary to its maintenance.
Under the first kind one may place the causes of sleep, which act
very powerfully, including cold, sedative passions, poisons, and
all causes of very violent excitation"-based on Physiology by
M. Cullen, M.D., here retranslated from M. Bosquillon's French
translation (Paris: Th. Barrois, I785), section II, chapter 3, par
agraph CXXXVI, which was in turn based on the third and last
English edition.
7
On Brown and the various senses given to the terms irritability,
incitability, and excitability by Bichat, Cuvier, and Flourens, see
Dutrochet's letter to E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire dated I2 August
I 8 22 in J. and T. Schiller, Henri Dutrochet, le materialisme me
caniste e,t la physiologie generate (Paris: Blanchard, I975), pp.
I96-I97.
8
In Latin: vitam coactum statum esse.
9
In Latin: Cadavera incidas.
IO
Charles Daremberg, Histoire des sciences medicates, I 8 70, p.
I I42.
II
From similar theoretical axioms Broussais drew conclusions al
most opposite to those of Brown: "All of Brown's patients were
destined to become athletes. All of Broussais's were supposed to
be reduced to the state of diaphanous bodies. One left Brown's
MEDICAL IDEOLOGY
5o care with a ruddy complexion, Broussais's as pale as a win'
sheet. For Brown stimulation was the remedy, for Broussais
tation was the ill. One took care of the blood, the other let it f
in great torrents. The Scottish physician stirred and fanned
fire, the doctor from Val de Grace saw flames everywhere
sought to extinguish them" (ibid., p. 1 1 2 1 ) .
12
See my L e Normal e t le pathologique (Paris: Presses Unive
taires de France, 1966), pp. 26-3 I .

3 B acteriology and the End of Nineteenth-Century
"Medical Theory "
�
Nothing in the history of science is more instructive than

to compare a successful practice with contemporary theo
ries that were hostile to it because incapaole of establishing
a deterministic frame within which the practice could be
seen as legitimate.
In the nineteenth century a Swiss physician by the
name of Odier proposed the new name vaccine for what
had been called cowpox, a disease that Jenner had shown
to be a lesser of two evils, for it could protect humans
against smallpox. Vaccination, which gradually replaced
inoculation with smallpox itself, was of course the first ef
fective treatment invented for a real disease, and it quickly
demonstrated its power to transform the physical and
moral conditions of human life on a vast scale. But none
of the medical systems of the time was even remotely ca
pable of explaining the statistically measurable success of
the treatment or to account for certain failures, which were
soon imputed to rapid changes in what came to be called
the "vaccine substance." 1 Lacking understanding, it is easy
to condemn. One English physician protested, "ls it in
man's power to alter the ordinary course of nature?" 2
Of course no one at the time could have imagined that
vaccination did nothing other than exploit and direct na-
52 ture's ordinary course. No one could have imagined that
one day the ordinary powers of nature would be under
stood and multiplied many times over through the artifice
of chemistry. Nor could anyone have foreseen that the
power of vaccines and serums would one day be explained
by a theory of chemical agents.
The medical theories-I should say systems-that the
eighteenth century bequeathed to the nineteenth were not
replaced by superior medical theories. Rather, they suc
cumbed to a revolution in the art of healing brought about
by chemistry, a science that, according to Laurent and Ber
thelot, created its own objects. IJ:.1 other words, it altered
the ordinary course of nature. Thus Edward Jenner's work
was justified a century later by Paul Ehrlich. But the path
from one to the other was not without detou.rs. One need
not be a Hegelian to admit that in medicine, too, history
rarely follows a straight line.
To simplify (probably to excess) the differe.1;1ce between an

cient (primarily Greek) medicine and the modern medicine
inaugurated by Vesalius· and Harvey and celebrated by Ba
con and Descartes, one might say t4�t ¢he former was con
J, €
templativ he latter operationaei · \Ancient · medicine was
.
founded upon a supposed isomorphism between- the
cosmiC order and the equilibrium of the organism, reflected
in nature's presumed power to correct disorders on her
own. Nature the physician was respected by a therapeutics
of watchfulness and support. By contrast, modern medi
cine was activist in its orientation. Bacon · expressed the
hope that it would learn from chemistry and Descartes that
it would learn from mechanics . . Yet between the Greeks
and the moderns, for all that they were separated by . the
Coper11ican re�olution · and its critical consequences, the

53 difference remained philosophical, without perceptible im:
pa�t on the health ()f man.ki_nd. The shared project of Ba
__
con and Descartes, to preserve health and to avoid or at

' least delay the decline of old age-in short, to prolong
life-resulted in no notable achievements. Although Mal
ebranche anc:\Jater Mariotte spoke of "experimental med
icine," the phrase remained a signifier in search of a
signified. Eighteenth-century medicine remained a symp
tomatology and nosology, that is, a system of classification
explicitly based on that of the naturalists. Medical etiology
squandered its energies in the erection of systems, reviving
the ancient doctrines of solidism and humorism by intro
ducing new physical concepts such as magnetism and gal
vanism or by raising metaphysical objections to the
procedures of those who would assimilate medicine to me
chanics. Therapeutics, guided by pure empiricism, alter
nated between skeptical eclecticism and obstinate
dogmatism. Tragically, medicine could not accomplish its
goals. It remained an empty discourse about practices
often not yery different from magic.
Freud said of ancient medicine that psychic therapy
was the only treatment it had to offer, and much the same
thing could have been said about medicine in the eigh
teenth and most of the nineteenth centuries. ·By this I mean
that the presence and personality of the physician were the
primary remedies in many afflictions of which anxiety was
� major component. This accounts for that remarkable
phenomenon of the mid-eighteenth- century, the return to
· Hippocratic medicine, watchful expectation, and the prin
aple of primiem non nocere: "Above all do no harm." This
was good advice in a society in which most of the physi
cian's patients were vigorous adults with powers of resist
ance proven by their triumph over innumerable and often
fatal childhood diseases such as dysentery and malnutri
tion and contagious diseases such as tuberculosis and
typhoid. T�e effects of these diseases on human life ex-
BACTERIOLOGY
54 pectancy (hot even counting the consequences of vvar anc
famine) are well known. The deplorable gap between th<
· theory and the practice of medicine bears eloquent witnes�
to the limits of man's abilities, and for all his efforts mar
remained incapable of preventing disease and prematun
death. Eighteenth-century philosophers leveled a finger o:
accusation at this dreadful state of affairs when they callee
Divine Justice to appear before the bar of Reason.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, however:
this picture began to change. Three phenomena alter�Q_ili(
situation of European medicine. The first was the institu·
tional and cultural change that Michel Foucault has bap·
tized "the birth of the clinic," which combined hospital
reforms in Vienna and Paris with increasingly widespread
use of such exploratory practices as percussion (Auenbriig
ger, Corvisart) and mediate auscultation (Laennec) and
with systematic efforts to relate observed symptoms to an
atomical and pathological data. Second, )a rational attitude:
of therapeutic skepticism was fostered and developed in
both Austria and France, as Ackerknecht has shown.�
Third, physiology gradually liberated itself from its subser
ii!
'( vience to classical anatomy and became �n independent
medical discipline, which at first focused on disease at the:
tissue level, as yet unaware that eventually it would come
to focus even more sharply on the cell. And physiologists
Ii looked to physics and chemistry for examples as well as
tools. J
Hence � J1ew model of medicine was �l:!bo_ra_t�d. New
diseases were identified and distinguished, most notably
in pulmonary and cardiac pathology (pulmonary edema,
bronchial dilation, endocarditis). Old medications, whose
numbers had proliferated with no discernible effect, were
discounted. And rival medical theories cast discredit on
one another. The new model was one of knowledge with
out system, based on the collection of facts and if possible
the elaboration of laws confirmed by experiment. This

55 · knowledge, it was hoped, would be capable of conversion
into effective therapies, whose use could be guided by crit
ical awareness of their limitations.
In France elaboration of the new medical model was
pursU:ed first by �oussais, then by Magendie, and finally
by Claude Bernard. Despite the traditional claims of med
ical historians, however, it can be shown that the physio
fogical model remained an ideology. If the goal of the
program was eventually achieved, it was reached by routes
quite different from those envisioned by the program's
authors.
II
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, probably the

last of the great medical systems attracted adherents in
many of Europe's hospitals and medical schools. John
Brown's Elementa medicinae (1780, translated in 1 79 5 as
Elements of Medicine) was enthusiastically received in
Italy and Austria, and in Germany it inflamed romantic
philosophers .an4 physicians influenced by the vogue for
Naturphilosophie. It provided both Novalis and Schelling
with a universal system capable of explaining every fact.
Brown's system was based on the theory of incitability, the
doctrine of sthenia and asthenia, a therapeutics based on
unremitting stimulation, and a radical antinature philoso
phy. One of its more trenchant prop�sitions was that "life
is a coerced state" (par. 72). And Brown exhorted physi
cians to take an active role in preserving it: "Never do
nothing. Do not trust to the forces of nature. She can do
nothing without extreme measures" (par. 9 5 ) .
What if one combines Brown's doctrine with Bichat's
.
teachings? For Brown., disease was . not ari intraorganic
being (etre) but a relation be�een the organism and its
environment. By contrast, Bich3:t, S".alpel in hand, shows
BACTERIOLOGY
56 us disease as an alteration of tissue. From this observatio1
he derived the principle of a genuinely etiological or causa
pathology, the basis for a monist nosology that he used t<
challenge all essentialist and pluralist nosologies. "For doc
tors who have followed progress in physiological medicine
the view that disorganizations of the lung, breast, testicle
uterine neck, and so forth are individual entities (etres) be·
longs to the distant past. An osteosarcoma, a spinaventosa
a pneumonia, and a chronic gastritis do not proceed frorr.
different principles. A truthful observer can find nothing ir
them but the results of irritation of the tissues, which diffe1
only in circumstantial ways having no bearing on the es
sence of the disease." 4 Disease is inflammation, that is, an
excess of irritation, which is a normal condition of all or
ganic existence.5 For this the remedy was depletion, either
general through bloodletting or local through the applica
tion of leeches. It is possible to gauge the extent to which
this sys,tematic treatment was applied to a particular pop
ulation. In 1 820 France exported slightly more than a mil
lion leec� es; in 1 827 it imported more than thirty-three
million.6 \
This, in brief outline, was the physiological medicine
of Fran�ois Joseph Victor Broussais ( 1772-1 8 3 8). The
choice of the name "physiological medicine" was polemi
cal, intended to discredit a certain way of using tpe results
of anatomopathology, even as revised by Bichat.(In Brous
sais's view it was not enough simply to replace arlal:Jatomy
of regional organs with an anatomy of tissue layers. One
had to ask why and how a particular histological forma
tion was affected instead of some other. One had to be able
to explain a certain state of disorganization as the result of
a process normal and natural in itself but somehow acci
dentally permitted to proceed to an excessive degree.
It should be noted, without attaching undue i�por
tance to the fact� that Broussais's doctrine achieved ·its
· height of popularity around l 8 30, the year of the July Rev-

57 olution (and it was no secret that Broussais's sympathies
lay with the republican revolutionaries), but did not sur
. vive the cholera epidemic of l 8 3 2. Statistical methods, in
. traduced into medical practice by P.�C.-A. Louis ( 1787-
1 8 72), ha� already demc;mstrated that Broussais's thera
peutic techniques were no more successful than those of
his colleagues in the hospitals. 7 In part the problem was
that cholera could not be encompassed within the frame
work of a doctrine that claimed that all morbid processes
were homogeneous. More seriously, antiphlogistic therapy
proved powerless to combat the disease, a fact that in ret
rospect hardly seems surprising. Forced to acknowledge
that two-fifths of his hospitalized patients had died, Brous
sais answered his critics by pointing to his S?Ccesses among
his private clientele. But the death of his most eminent pa
tient, King Louis-Philippe's prime minister Casimir Perier,
finally discredited the systematic use of antistimulant phys
iological treatments. 8
· It should come as no surprise, then, that when Claude
Bernard proposed physiology as the cornerstone of authen
tic scientific medicine, he was careful to separate himself
from Broussais's abortive attempt, which he characterized
pejoratively not as a theory but as a "system." According
to Bernard, Broussais's physiology was a "finished physi
ology, closed and systematized, in which all facts were re
duced to a single idea." 9 By contrast, "experimental
medicine must be based on experimental physiology." All
things considered, Broussais's only_ prQgre_ss was in his
"way of looking at" the relation between pathology and
physiology, 10 whereas experimental , meqicine was sup
posed to lead to a new way of acting.11
What Bernard, writing here as the heir of Enlighten
ment philosophy, called .a system should perhaps be called
instead a medical ideology/For i:nany scholars the notion
of scientific ideology is still'controversial. By it I mean a
discourse that parallels the development of a science aJ.J.d
BACTERIOLOGY
58 that, under the pressure of pragmatic needs, makes state
ments that go beyond what has actually been proved by
research. In relation to science itself it is both presumptu
ous and misplaced. Presumptuous because it believes that
the end has been reached when research in fact stands at
the beginning. Misplaced because when the achievements
of science actually do come, they are not in the arec:is where
the ideology thought they would be, no \are they achieved
in the manner predicted by the ideology. }
What Broussais promised, someone else had already
begun to deliver. This man, too, had declared that "medi
cine is nothing but the physiology of the sick man." 12 Just
one year after Broussais's History of Phlegmasias ( 1 808),
this man had published his Examination of the Action of
Some Plants on the Spinal Cord. He founded the Jour
nal of Experimental Physiology a year before Broussais
founded the Annals of Physiological Medicine and in it in
1 8 22 confirmed Charles Bell's discovery ( 1 8 n ) through
his "Experiments on the Functions of Roots on the Spinal
Nerves." From the titles of these works alone we gather the
difference between the orientation of Broussais's work and
that of this other physician: Frarn;ois Magendie (1783-
1 8 5 5 ) . Whereas Broussais had worked first in military and
later in civilian hospitals, Magendie was a man of the lab
oratory as well as a hospital physician. For him, experi
mental physiology was the study of the physics of vital
�
phenomena such as absorption. He conducted s stematic
experiments with animals to test the pharmacodynamic
properties of newly isolated classes of chemical com
pounds such as the alkaloids. As early as 1 821 Magendie's
Formulary carried the subtitle "For the Use and Prepara
tion of Various Medications Such as Nux Vomica, Mor
phine, Prussic Acid, Strychnine, Veratrine, Iodine, and the
Alkalis of Quinquinas" (i.e., the quinine of Pelletier and
Caventou, 1 8 20).
In short, Magendie's experimental medicine differed

59 ·f::�__Br?us��s'� physiolo_gical medicine in_t��ee -��x�: t4
was_ centered m the laboratory rather than tJ:ie hosp1taJ; t {
experimented on animals rather than on me9); and tinstead
of Galerl'tt principles it used extracts isolated by ph arma
ceutical chemistry, for example, replacing opium with mor
phine and quinquina with quinine�) Of these three
differences, the second was initially gre�ted with the great
est incomprehension and criticism. Magendie's vivisections
aroused hostile protest and demonstrations, no doubt for
· reasons more profound than compassion for animal suffer
ing. For to reason from animals to man was to abolish the
distance between the two. The practice was held to stem
from a materialist philosophy, and success would result in
the temptation to extend the experiments to man. When
accused of experimenting on humans, Magendie denied
the charge. But if administering unproven drugs is experi
mentation (as Claude Bernard himself was one of the first
to admit13), then Magendie did experiment on humans,
patients in hospitals, which he considered a vast labo
ratory where patients couid be grouped and studied
j comparatively.
'
Magendie is remembered today for a body of work
that has been surpassed but not repudiated. Yet there was
a striking gap between his therapeutics and his physiology.
In treating private patients Magendie was a therapeutic
skeptic influenced by the prevailing Hippocratic practice of
watchful expectation. Flourens reports �hat to young col
leagues whom he deemed unduly proud of their authori
tative prescriptions he said, "Clearly you have never tried
doing nothing." 14 As for contagious diseases, Magendie's
physiology made him no more clairvoyant or critical than
Broussais's physiologism made him. After the yellow fever
epidemic in Barcelona in 1 821, Magendie approved the
conclusions of an anticontagionist report submitted to the
Academy of Sciences. Sent to London in I 8 3 2 to study
the steps taken there against cholera, he returned to Paris
BACTERIOLOGY
60 convinced that the infection was not contagious. As presi·
dent of the National Committee of Public Hygiene in
1 848, he was instrumental in amending legislation pertain
ing to quarantines, a preventive measure ·invented in the
fourteenth century by the cities of Venice and Marseilles.15
Perhaps the most surprising fact is that this pioneer of ex
perimental pharmacology understood nothing of the phys
iological mechanism of anesthesia and vehemently
opposed its use in surgery. He refused to accept this form
of human experimentation ' and called etherization "im"".
moral" because it transformed the patient into a cadave�
and caused hysteria in women. He was never able to see
that the discovery of anesthesia was a decisive moment in
. the application of specific chemical compounds to specific
physiological mechanisms and not merely a clever inven
tion of dentists and surgeons : Perhaps because he had re
discovered the dual function of the spinal nerves, parts of
the motor as well as the sensory systems, he did not con
sider pain to be an affliction. It was, he s aid, "a law of
nature, a necessity." 1 6 Nor was he interested in the fact that
anesthetic drugs had been tested by physicians and chem
ists on themselves and that self-experimentation was the
legitimate and logical culmination of the syste�atic use of
animal experimentation that he himself had instituted.
III
A year before his death, Claude Bernard, writing the in

troduction for a planned Treatise on Experiment in the
Medical Sciences, took literally a well-known quip of
Magendie's. Bernard repeated his predecessor's self
characterization: "He was the ragpicker of physiology. He
was merely the initiator of experimentation. Today it is a
discipline that has to be created, a method." 17 For Berna,rd,
a . _self-styled ragpicker was no _ doubt superior to a dog-
I
61 matic system-builder who did not even realize that he was
bµilding a systemr=Jike Broussais. But what are we to make
.of Bernard's repeated insistence that only he appreciates
the true requirements of the experimental method?
Insufficient attention has been paid, I think, to two
concepts in Bernard's methodological writings that were
for him inseparable: theory and progress. Experimental
· medicine is progressive, he argued, because it elaborates
theories and because those theories are themselves progres
sive, that is, open. Bernard's view is summed up in two
obiter dicta: "An experimentalist never outlives his work.
He is always at the level of progress." And: "With theories
there are no more scientific revolutions. Science grows .
gradually and steadily." 18 Add to this the two concepts of
determinism and action-knowledge of the one being es
sential for success of the other-and you have the four
components of a medical ideology that clearly mirrored the
progressive ideology of mid-nineteenth-century European
industrial society. In the light of more recent concepts such
as Bachelard's epistemological break and Kuhn's structure
of scientific revolutions, Bernard's concept of theory with
out revolution has drawn understandable and legitimate
criticism. In Bernard's day physicists still found in Newton
and Laplace reasons to believe in principles of conserva
tion. Clausius had yet to attract the attention of a large
part of the scientific community to the principle of Carnot,
of which philosophers were a fortiori even less aware. Far
aday's experiments, Ampere's laws, and Maxwell's calcu
lations had yet to reveal electrical current as a possible
substitute for coal as the motor of the industrial machine.
In 1 872 the German physiologist Du Bois Reymond (of
whom Bernard had on several occasions expressed a rather
contemptuous opinion) displayed sufficient confidence in
Laplacian determinism to predict when England would
burn her last piece of coal (Uber die Grenzen des Natur
erkennens). B�t in that same year the Academy of Sciences
BACTERIOLOGY
in Paris, consulted for the second time about the invei
of an electrical worker named Zenobe Gramme, finall
knowledged that practice had raced ahead of theory
authenticated a revolution in technology.6n short, the
cept of a theory without revolution, whiCh Bernard
to be the solid basis of his methodology, was perhar
more than a sign of internal limitations in his own me
theory: experimental medicine, active and triump]
which Bernard proposed as a definitive model of 1
medicine in an industrial society ought to be. He

trasted his model with that of contemplative, wat<
medicine, a model appropriate to agricultural societi'
i .!
which time was governed by quasi-biological rather
industrial norms. The son of a vine-grower who rr
taineo a deep attachment to his native soil, Bernard
never able to appreciate fully that science requires not
1l · ·i
that the scientist abandon ideas invalidated . by facts
ii
i. also that he give up the personalized style of research
! was the hallmark of Bernard's work. In science it wa�

same as in agriculture, where economic progress had
ii I
�Il
rooted many from the soil.
' :�� !
ii Paradoxically, the internal limitations of Berm
11·! lti�::
•I i �t�! theory of disease (etiology and pathogeny) were due tc
lp1;
>jl 1
,; I r
�:
,,, ,1 initial succes/es of his research as Magendie's succei
t
: For he had discovered the influence of the sympathetic
1�11!
,,··
,i
1· vous system on animal heat ( 1 8 5 2) ; had generated, in
course of research on glycogenesis, a case of diabetes l
1
1 lesion of the pneumogastric nerve at the level of the foi
!\}:\
,,
ventricle ( 1 849 -1 8 5 1 ) ; and had demonstrated the selec

[I \ action of curare on the motor nerves. As a result, Berr
1J conceived an idea that he never repudiated, namely, tha
If
morbid disorders are controlled by the nervous systei
I"' i' that diseases are poisonings, and that infectious viruses
agents of fermentation that alter the in'.ternal environn
! i in which cells live. 20 Although these propositions were 1
1: 1 1
i hl adapted to quite different experimental situat�ons, n
'i i
:I!
F '. i i
1 \1
63 can be said W have been directly responsible for a positive
therapeutic application. What is more, Bernard's stubborn
views on the subject of pathogeny prevented him from
seeing the practical implications of the work of certain
contemporaries whom he held in contempt because they
were not physiologists. Convinced of the identity of the
normal and the pathological, Bernard was never able·
to take a sincere interest in cellular pathology or germ
pathology.
To be sure, Bernard accepted the cellular theory, albeit
not unreservedly, since he always believed in the existence
of the blastema. But against Rudolf Virchow, the author of
Zellularpathologie ( 1 8 5 8), he objected that alterations ob
. served in the cells originated in the nervous system: "The
normally excited cell nourishes itself and preserves its
properties. The irritated cell proliferates and changes,
yielding a heterologous tissue. Virchow does not admit
that the nerves are causes of irritation. I believe the con
trary." 21 And he adds, "The nerves dominate the hu
mors . . . . One must be a neuropathologist, and humorism
must be subordinated to it [sic] ." 22
Claude Bernard died on 10 February 1 878. On the
following 3 o April, at the Academy of Medicine in Paris,
Louis Pasteur, who was not a physician but a chemist, read
a twenty-three-page paper entitled "The Theory of Germs
and Its Applications to Medicine and Surgery." 23 This
theory, which through the work of Koch and Pasteur al
ready promised health and longer life to millions of men
and animals, also spelled the end of _all the medical theories
of the nineteenth century. lo£ Pasteur Claude Bernard said
several times that he "was pursuing his ideas" and that he
wanted "to direct the course of nature." 24 But he did not
pursue Pasteur's ideas, for the simple reason that he was
pursuing his own, namely, the idea that disease never intro
J-I
duces functional innovations e was surprised when any
one asked what were the normal equivalents of smallpox,
BACTERIOLOGY
64 measles, and scarlet fever. His answer was that these dis
eases were related to some as yet unknown function of the
skin. He stated that "the syphilis virus and the rabies virus
are produced under the influence of the nervous system" 25
and that the viruses themselves are not necessary to the
manifestation of predispositions because there are "spon
taneous cases of rabies." 26 Although the concept of resist
ance was later shown to play an important part in the
relation of microbe to organism, certain uses of concepts
from Bernardian physiology undeniably impeded the
therapeutic advances made toward the end of the century
by students of Pasteur and Koch.
IV
Bernard never really understood Virchow, despite the lat

ter's belief, consonant with Bernard's, that "patho�s
J;J.othing other than physiology with obstacles." To Bernard
cellular pathology seemed to mark a return to the anatom
ical point of view. Furthermore, Virchow, in whose labo
ratory Schwann discovered that animals shared the cellular
texture described in plants by Dutrochet, Brisseau-Mirbel,
and Schleiden, had rejected the idea of the blastema in for
mulating the aphorism omnis cellula a cellula. Cellular de
velopment, he argued, is a generation of organizations.
Even the blood is composed of organized elements. Neither
the vessel nor the nerve is necessary to the life of the cell.
In no sense are organs dependent on humors, from either
a structural or a functional point of view. Rather, the h1:1-
mors are directly or indirectly dependent on certain or
gans, which determine the nature of their action on the
organism. "In transporting cellular theory from the labora
t<;>ry where it was born to the pathology department of the
hospital clinic, Virchow enabled it to play a practical role,
but only in surgery. Microscopic pathology led to a refo��

�
65 in the treatment of tumors. But as Ackerknecht has shown
several times, cellular pathology had no therapeutic con
sequences, and Virchow and his pupils added nothing
new to the arsenal of the great German clinicians of the
period.27 .
Yet it was an extension of microscopic techniques for
the study of cell preparations and the use of synthetic ani
line stains (manufactured in Germany after 1 870) that led,
for the first time in the history of medicine, to a therapeutic
technique that was both effective and unrelated to any
medical theory: chemotherapy, invented by Paul Ehrlich
(1 8 54-19 1 5). From Waldeyer in Strasbourg Ehrlich had
learned how to use stains to examine normal and patho
logical tissue, and at Breslau he had attended lectures on
pathological anatomy given by Julius Cohnheim ( 1 8 3 9 -
1 8 84), a student o f Virchow, who would later show that
inflammation was caused by the passage of leucocytes
through the capillary wall. Virchow's ideas reached Ehrlich
through Cohnheim. Nevertheless, if cellular pathology
played an indirect part in the invention of chemotherapy,
the role of bacteriology and the discovery of immunity was
more direct. The problem that Ehrlich stated and solved
can be formulated as follows: Through what chemical
compounds with specific affinity for certain infectious
agents or cells could one act directly on the cause rather
than on the symptoms of disease, in imitation of the anti
toxins present in various serums ?
This is not the place to delve into the circumstances
surrounding the discovery of immunity or to revive a dis
pute over priority, an exercise useful for reminding us that
the constitution of scientific knowledge does not necessar
ily require the simultaneous existence of all who claim to
be its authors.28 It is of little importance that the Berlin
School preceded the Paris School by several months, or
that Koch's pupil von Behring concluded before Pasteur's
pupil Roux that diphtheria cannot be treated with a vac-
BACTERIOLOGY
66 cine but only prevented by injection of serum taken from a
convalescent patient, provided one has a convalescent pa
tient, that is, a survivor of the disease. Roux was able to
prepare the toxin in vitro. Von Behring managed to atten
uate its virulenc::e with trichloride of iodine. Roux was
more successful than von Behring in increasing the activity
of the serum.
Nevertheless, Ehrlich, whom Koch put in contact with
von Behring, dreamed that chemistry could one day endow
man with powers far beyond those of nature.29 He hit upon
the idea of looking for substances with specific affinities for
certain parasites and their toxins on the model of stains
with elective histological affinities. For what is a stain but
a vector aimed at a particular formation in a healthy or
infected organism? When a chemical compound directed
at a particular cell penetrates that cell, what happens -is
analogous to the way in which a key fits into a lock. Ehr
lich's first success came in l 904, when in collaboration
with Shiga he discovered that Trypan red destroys the try
panosome that causes sleeping sickness. Later came the
discovery of Salvarsan, or 606 (19 10), and Neo-Salvarsan,
which proved less effective in combatting syphilis than was
believed at fi �t. But Ehrlich's real success lay not so much
in the products that he identified himself as in those that
would ultimately be discovered in pursuit of his fundamen
tal hypothesis: that the affinities of chemical stains could
be used as a systematic technique for developing artificial
antigens. Using the same method, Gerhardt Domag discov
ered prontosil red (193 5), the first of a glorious series of
sulfamides. Its declining efficacy led to the greatest of
triumphs to this day, the chemical synthesis of penicillin by
Florey and Chain (1939). This is not to say that therapeu
tics since the discovery of chemotherapy has been reduced
to the automatic and inflexible application of �hemical an
titoxins or antibiotics, as if it were enough to administer a
remedy and let it do its work. Gradually physicians learned

67 that infectious agents develop resistance to the drugs used
ag�inst them, and that organisms sometimes defend them-
. selves, paradoxically enough, against their chemical guard
ians. Hence it was necessary to develop combined
treatment regimens.30 But such flexibility, typical of mod
ern .therapies, was made .possible only by the rationalist
simplification inherent in Ehrlich's program: since cells
choose between stains, let us invent stains that will infalli
bly choose particular cells.
But what does it mean to invent a stain? It means to
change the positions of the atoms in a molecule, to alter its
chemical structure in such a way that its color can be read
out, as it were, from its formula. Ehrlich's project was not
simply impossible; it was inconceivable in the time of Ma
gendie. It was not until l 8 5 6. that William Perkin Sr. ob
tained a mauve dye from aniline as the outcome of research
directed toward an entirely different goal. It was not until
1 86 5 that Kekule (1829-1 896) published his paper "The
Composition of Aromatic Compounds." After confirming
that thf'. carbon atom is tetravalent, Kekule determined the
structure of benzene and gave the name "aromatic" to its
derivatives to distinguish them from compounds involving
the fatty acids, which, along wi�h the alcohols, were the
primary focus of chemical interest in the days of Magendie
and Bernard.
The theoretical creation of new chemical substances
was confirmed on a vast scale by the chemical indu�.try.
Alizarin, the principal component of madder; which Perkin
in England and Graebe and Caro in Germany separately
and simultaneously synthesized in 1 8 68, was within ten
years' time being produced at the rate of 9,500 tons an
nually. Finally, aniline, the most elaborate of the dye com
pounds, bestowed its prestigious name on the German
firms Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) 1 and Anilin
Konzern (1904).
Thus, two o f the preconditions necessary for the de-
BACTERIOLOGY
68 velopment of chemotherapy as a replacement for the ther
apies associated with the old medical theories were a new
symbolic representation for chemical substances and a new
technology for producing organic compounds, which sup
planted the old extractive processes. These were events
with fixed, ascertainable dates; their place in history could
not have been deduced in advance. Hence chemotherapy
could not have existed without a certain level of scientific
and industrial society. Between Jenner and Ehrlich came
the indispensable discovery of aniline, which no one could
have foreseen at the beginning of the century. In his study
of the "rationalism of color," Gaston Bachelard wrote,
"The chemist thinks of color in terms of the very blueprint
that guides his creation. Therein lies a communicable, ob
jective reality and a marketable social reality. Anyone who
manufactures aniline knows the reality and the rationality
of color." 31
There was, as I mentioned, yet another precondition for

the discovery of � emotherapy, namely, the discovery of
serotherapy. This historical condition in turn depended on
other historical conditions, which too many historians of
medicine have been inclined to view as mere accidents in
cidental to various kinds of technological activity. In con
sidering the precursors of the immunization techniques
perfected at the end of the nineteenth century, I shall look
at the work of Pasteur rather than at that ,of Koch, partly
because it came first chronologically and partly because
Pasteur's work was of more general import, for "i� not �mly
modified the relationship between biology and chemistry
but changed the representation of the world of living
things generally, the relations between beings, and the
functions ascribed to chemical reactions."3 2

Contrary to a widely held view, Fran�ois Dagognet ar
gues that it was not because �f technical problems raised
by industrialists, artisans, and animal breeders ("mala
dies" of beer, wine, silkworms, and sheep) that Pasteur
took so long to develop "Pasteurism." Rather, Pasteur
encountered technical problems because, from his first en
counter with theoretical chemistry, he saw the experimen
tal modification of natural products as a theoretical tool
for analyzing reality. For him, the laboratory was a place
for reworking substances given by nature or art and a place
for freeing dormant or blocked causal mechanisms-in
short, a place for revealing reality. Hence laboratory work
was directly affected by what was going on in the world of
technology.
The revolution in medical thinking began with the de
velopment of two methods for studying the properties of
crystals : stereometry and polarimetry. Dissatisfied with
Mitscherlich's explanations of the effect of polarized light
on tartrates p.nd paratartrates, Pasteur discovered the dif
i·
I
ferent orientation of the facets of paratartrate crystals.
After isolating the two different kinds of crystals, he ob
served that a solution made with one rotated polarized
light to the right, whereas a solution made with the other
rotated it to the left. When the two crystals were combined
in solution in equal parts, the optical effect was nullified.
When a solution of calcium paratartrate was fermented by
the effect of a mold, Pasteur noted that only the right
polarizing form of the crystal was altered. He therefore
inferred a connection between the properties of micro
organisms and molecular asymmetries. Dagognet has
shown how microbiology began with this ingenious rever
sal of a result in biochemistry. A microscopic organism, a
mold or a yeast, was shown to be capable of distinguishing
between optical isomers. Pasteurism converted chemical
separation �y bacteria into bacteriological isolation by
chemical isomers.33 Thus confirmed in his belief that there
BACTERIOLOGY
70 was a structural contrast between the asymmetrical living
organism and the mineral and hence justified in rejecting
any explanation receptive to the notion of spontaneous
generation, Pasteur linked germ, fermentation, and disease
in a unified theoretical framework. Since my purpose here
is simply to inflect on matters of history and epistemology,
there is no need to recall the subsequent progress, doubts,
retreats, or even temporary errors that Pasteur made in
elaborating this theory.
Thus crystallography revealed to Pasteur the struc
tural novelty of the living organism: its asymmetry. Medi
cal practice, which at the end of the century would finally
begin to deliver on promises that medicine had made
through the ages, acquired new efficacy as a result of re
search whose fundamental concerns could not have been
more reI?ote from those of the medical practitioner. At
the end of this detour,· the medical systems bequeathed by
eighteenth-century physicians to their nineteenth-century
counterparts, as well as those newly invented by physiolo
gists in the first half of the nineteenth century, were rele
gated to the ideological empyrean. Previously I ment��ned
th!ee fundamental shifts that had to i:ike · -pI��e. _be�o�e
progress w�s possible: from the hospital to the laboratory�
from huma'.n to animal research, and from treatment with
Galenic preparations to treatment with chemical com
pounds. But before these changes could bear fruit, a �<;m�t.h
change was necessary. Pasteur did not find the solution to
the pathological problems of living things in the realm of
the living. He found it by shifting his attention to crystals,
to those geometric embodiments of pure mineral sub
stance. He did not find it by treating living things as though
they were inert, as Magendie had attempted to do, but by
distinguishing living things from inert substances in terms
of their most general structural properties. It is .not surpris
ing that contemporaries, transfixed by the authority of
- Claude Bernard, at first failed to comprehend the signifi-

71 cance of Pasteur's method. In 1 8 63 the surgeon Leopold
Ollier ( 1 8 30-1900) wrote, "Dead nature cannot help us,
but living nature provides us with acceptable terms of com
parison." 34 This was not the first time that a man who ben
efited from the pra�tical consequences of a theoretical
discovery failed to grasp either the origins or the me�ning
of that discovery.
VI
As everyone knows, surgery, already fortified by the inven

tion of anesthesia, was further transformed by the devel
opment of aseptic and antiseptic practices. The surgeons
were the first to benefit from Pasteur's research. In 1 8 67,
Lister, a diligent reader of Pasteur, recommended the sys
tematic use of phenic acid, only twenty years after the bril
liant and pitiful Semmelweis (died l 8 6 5 ) was forced to
resign from the obstetrical clinic in Vienna for having re
quired his students to wash their hands.35
It was not until the end of the century, however, that
medicine obtained new techniques and substances capable
of acting on the causes and not the symptoms of disease. It
would be somewhat unfair, however, to conclude that
medicine simply harvested fruits that it had no part in fos
tering. It should be laid down as a general principle in the
history of science that discord and rivalry within the scien
tific community can never totally impede communication,
certainly not since the seventeenth century. For one thing;
it is impossible not to b.e affected in some ways by what
one rejects. , For another, even where exchange is impos
sible,_ everyone goes to the same market for supplies, so to
)
speak In the ni.neteenth century the market was primarily
one of instruments and raw mat�rials. Despite differences
of goals, moreover, the sciences generally delineate a com
mon field of exploration. In the long run you cannot have
BACTERIOLOGY
72 two chemistries, one for pharmacists, the other for chem
ists. If there are two pharmacologies, one for pharmacists
and the other for physicians, their premises cannot be anti
thetical. Although there may be several disciplines in a
medical school, a medical student has only one head, and
while there may be several clinics and laboratories in a hos
pital, a patient's body cannot be divided. Hence it is im
possible to imagine how a body of medical knowledge such
as bacteriology could have been produced in the nineteenth
century without owing something to medical theories that
it helped to relegate to the realm of ideology.
In Europe, from the late eighteenth century on, autop
-
sies were regularly performed. Pathologists, rather th �n i�
terpret signs on the patient's body, searched for internal
lesions, even after death. The microbial theory of infec
tious disease also led physicians to look inside the body for
the cause of illness. Between the era of pathological anat
omy and that of biochemistry, histopathology and biopsy
contributed to changing physicians' ideas about the scale
of th� athogenic agent.36
·
Sub sequently, new clinical schools in Austria, France,
and Germany exploded such ambiguous pathological con
cepts as fever and inflammation, which had enjoyed such a
vogue in the early nineteenth century. Combining patho
logical anatomy with clinical practice, doctors learned to
make differential diagnoses and to identify individual syn
dromes. This was a necessary though not sufficient condi
tion for-the development of the idea of a specific etiology
nothing less than a conceptual revolution. Previously spec
ificity lay in the remedy, and it was there that one sought
an indicator of the nature of the disease. Between the old
notion of specific remedies and the new notion of specific
ity of the microbial agent, the intermediate notion of path
ological specificity played a positive role.
·
one can even - argue that Claude Bernard's stubborn
identificatiOn of disease with poisoning, his insistence that

73 sickness was nothing other than a change in the cellular
environment produced by toxins generated by the action
of the nervous system, made it easier for people to grasp
the fact that infection · is the result of specific toxins pro
duced by each species of microorganism. This despite Ber
nard's hostility to Pasteur's explanation of fermentation, a
hostility made public by Marcellin Berthelot, who, a few
months after Ber:nard's death, published in a journal a pre
viously unpublished note in which Bernard accepted the
idea that yeast could be spontaneously generated in the liq
uid undergoing fermentation. He explained this phenome
non as the result of the presence in the liquid of a nonliving
·
form of yeast, an idea that Pasteur rejected-wrongly, as
we now know.
This plea. on behalf of men left stranded by the history
of medicine on paths that history herself decided not to
take should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the
merits for which they deserve recognition are to be gauged
in terms . of their indirect relation to a collective achieve
ment to which they contributed nothing.
Notes
1_
The ingenuity of Spanish physicians in this period is worth not
ing. Vaccine had been brought from Paris to Spain, and in order
to export it to the Spanish colonies they hit on the plan of sending
twenty-two unvaccinated children overseas by ship. The first was
vaccinated when the ship departe� in November 1 803, the sec
ond at sea, using the pustules that developed in the first, and so
on all the way to South Aµterica. Three years later, Dr. Balmis,
the royal surgeon, was able to assure His Majesty that vaccina
tion was practiced in all of Spain's colonies. See Paul Hauduroy,
Microbes (Lausanne: Rouge et Cie, 1944), pp. 73,ff. This expedi
tion has been the subject -of numerous works, a list of which can
be found in Michael M. Smith, "The Real 'Expedicion Maritima
de la Vacuna' in New Spain and Guatemala," Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society 64. 1 (1974).
2
Dr. Rowley, "Ineffectiveness and Dangers of Vaccine," ibid., p.

55·
BACTERIOLOGY
74 3
Therapie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1970) ; "Die Therapie in Fegefeuer
wahrend des 19 .Jarhunderts," Osterreichische Arztezeitung
24 (March 1969) ; "Aspects of the History of Therapeutics," Bul
letin of the History of Medicine 3 6.5 (1962).
4
Histoire des phlegmasies, r 822, vol. r, p. 5 5. By essence of the
disease Broussais clearly means nothing other than identity of
relation of cause to effect. The first edition of this history dates
from 1 808.
5
"Any local heightening of the organic movements severe enough
to disturb the harmony of the functions and to disorganize the
tissue in which it is located must be regarded as an inflammation"
(ibid., p. 63).
6
E. H. Ackerknecht, Medecine at Paris Hospital, I794-I 84 8 (Bal
timore: 1967), p. 62. In a manual of hygiene entitled "Medecine
without Doctors," Dr. Audin-Rouviere, a great detractor of
Broussais who was eager to protect his readers against "the pain
ful and disgusting mark of these hideous reptiles," wrote, "For
eign �erchants, pitiless speculators, infested France, and though
it is al1-but incomprehensible there was soon a shortage of French
leeches. Our marshes and ponds were barely able to supply the
needs of a frenzied market. Spain, Poland, Egypt, Italy, and even
Turkey, our grateful allies, shipped cargoes of these wretched
creatures to suck our blood. So now it is Spanish, Italian, Egyp
tian, Polish, and Turkish leeches that vie with one another for the
privilege of drinking French blood with impunity." A footnote
reports that "a sign on a house near the Saint Martin Canal [in
Paris] bears the inscription 'Supplier of Foreign Leeches.' " See the
1 2th edition (Paris: 1 8 29), p. 46.
7
Jacques Piquemal, "Succes et decadence de la merhode nume-
rique en France a l'epoque de Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis,"
Medecine de France 250(1974 ) : n-1 2, 59 -60.
8
Jacques Piquemal, "Le chofera de 1 8 3 2 en France et la pensee
medicale,'' Thales ( 19 59): 27-72. See the end of the article, where
it is stated that "Casimir Perier's hearse metaphorically carried
to its grave the cadaver of a theory: F.-J. V. Broussais's
'physiologism.' "
9
Claude Bernard, Principes de mededne experimentale, L. Del-
houme, ed. (Lausanne: Alliance culturelle du Livre, 1962).

75 IO
Ibid., p. 2I I.
II
Ibid., pp. I 89, 406. Bernard succeeded in making contemporary
clinicians aware of his idea that pathology should be informed by
physiology. He convinced them, - moreover, that experimental
physiology was superior to a priori physiology. In I 8 66, a year
after the publication of the celebrated Introduction, J. M. Char
cot paid tribute to Bernard in the introduction to his Let;ons cli
niques sur les maladies des vieillards et les maladies chroniques
(Oeuvres completes de ]. M. Charcot, vol. 7, pp. iii-xxxiii). He
also alludes to the "remarkable speech" of his friend Brown
Sequard to the Irish College of Physicians (February I965), en
titled "On the Importance of the Application of Physiology to the
Practice of Medicine and Surgery."
!2
·cited b y Bouillaud in Essai sur la philosophie medicale et sur les
generalites de la clinique medicale, I 8 3 6, p. 69.
I3
Introduction a I 'etude de la medecine experimentale, part 2,
chapter 2, section 3 : "Vivisection."
I4
"Eloge de Magendie," in Recueil des eloges historiques, 3rd se-
ries, I 8 62.
I5
E . H . Ackerknecht, History and Geography o f the Most Impor
tant Diseases (New York, London: I965), p. I 3 .
I6
R . Fiilop-Miller, La Victoire sur la douleur (Paris: Albin Michel,
1940), p. 243 .
I7
Principes de medecine experimentale, p. 440.
I8
Ibid., pp. I 79-80.
I9
In his way Bernard remained faithful to Cuvier's view that the
nervous system is the animal and essentially the only organic
regulator.
20
See M. D. Grmek, Raisonnement experimental et recherches tox
icologiques chez Cl. Bernard (Geneva, Paris: D'roz, I973), espe
cially pp. 408-4 I 6.
2I
Principes de medecine experimentale, p . 227 ._
BACTERIOLOGY
76 22
Ibid., p. 240. On this question see M. D. Grmek, "Opinion de
Claude Bernard sur Virchow et la pathologie cellulaire," Castalia
2 r . 1 ( 1965) .
23
Recall that the term microbe was coined in 1 8 78 by Sedillot.
24
Principes de medecine experimentale, 1 8 77 appendix, p. 4 3 6.
25
Ibid., pp. 2 1 2-214.
26
Ibid., p. 244. It is conceivable that prior to l 878 one could be
lieve in the nervous etiology of rabies. But after 1 8 86? After
Meister and J upille had been cured in l 8 8 5 by inoculation of
dried rabid marrow, and after the cure of 726 patients in the lab
oratories of the Ecole Normale Superieure had been announced
on 1 2 April 1 8 86 ? Yet Paul Hauduroy reports a striking instance
of epistemological obstinacy. " One Paul Boullier, a veterinarian
from Courville in Eure-et-Loire, gave a series of lectures, which
he subsequently published under the title The Truth about Pas
teur. Boullier's article is for the most part vituperative and crude,
to say nothing of its errors and absurdities. Pasteur's supporters
are called 'inoculees' and 'unmuzzled dogs,' microbes are 'prod
ucts and not agents of fermentation,' rabies is not a disease but
'the reflection of a nervous affection whose character varies from
case to case,' and a veterinarian is a 'veterinarian and not a chem
ist.' It had just been announced at the Academy of Medicine that
tetanus is a microbial disease. 'What! Tetanus a contagious dis
ease! What serious person can countenance such a heresy?' A
note in the book indicates that 'out of respect for the many ladies
who honored me by attending my lecture, I omitted mentioning
that the illustrious Scientist vaccinates in the stomach, above the
navel"-cited in Microbes (Lausanne: Rouge et Cie, 1944),
p. 1 3 4·
27
"Zellularpathologie und Therapie," Clio medica 5 . 1 ( 1970).
28
Fran�ois Dagognet, "L'immunite, historique et methode," lec
tures at the Palais de la Decouverte, Paris, 4 January 1964.
29
On Ehrlich and his work see Hans Loewe, Paul Ehrlich, SchOpfer
der Chemotherapie (Stuttgart: 1 9 50); Felix Marti Ibanez, The
Mind and the World of Paul Ehrlich (New York: 1958), pp. 257-
269; Leon Vogel, "Paul Ehrlich," Revue d'histoire de la medecine
hebraique 84.,- 8 5 (1969 ) ; and Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, "The

77 Antigen-Antibody Reaction and the Physics and Chemistry of
Life," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48(1974) : 1-21.
_
30
On these matters see Fran�ois Dagognet, La Raison et /es remedes
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), and Surrealisme
therapeutique et formation des concepts medicaux, in homage to
Gaston Bachelard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957) .
31
L e Materialisme rationnel (Paris: Presses Universitaires d e France,
1953), p. 202.
32
Fran�ois Dagognet, Methodes e t doctrine dans l'oeuvre de Pas
teur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).
33
Op. cit., p . 67.
34
Cited by Rene Leriche, La Philosophie de la chirurgie (Paris:
Flammarion, l 9 5 l).
35 .
On the revolution in surgery in the nineteenth century, see Paul
Lecene, L'Evolution de la chirurgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1923 ) ,
and Walter von Brunn, Histoire de la chirurgie, trans. C . Courv
(Paris: Lamarre, l 9 5 5). On Semmelweis see Louis-Ferdinand Ce
line, Mea culpa, followed by La Vie et I'oeuvre de Semmelweis
(Paris: Denoel and Steele, 1 93 7); and especially G. Gortvay and
I. Zoltan, Semmelweis: His Life and Work (Budapest, 1 968), and
Erna Lesky, lgnatz Philipp Semmelweis· und die Wiener medizin
ische Schule (Graz, 1 964).
36
The term biopsy was coined in 1 879 by Ernest Besnier, a Parisian
dermatologist.
BACTERIOLOGY
)
II Triumphs of Biological Rationality in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
I
�I
4 The Development of the Concept .of Biological
Regulation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries
When Die organischen Regulation.en was' published in

Leipzig in 1901, it may have appeared that a new discipline
had been established within animat biology. The author of
the book, Hans Driesch ( 1 8 67-1941), was an embryolo
gist. He is known for having employed the vocabulary of
Aristotelian ontology and teleology for the purpose of
"comprehending" the results of experimental research
conducted by members of the school of Entwicklungsme
chanik under the leadership of Wilhelm Ro_ux. The distinc
tion made between "mosaic eggs·" and "regulated eggs" -
a distinction whose sharpness was challenged almost from
the beginning-temporarily ended a controversy among
·
em�ryologists about whether the egg was isotropic or ani
sotropic. This controversy dated back to 1 875 and the
work of Wilhelm His, which was criticized by Eduard
Pfliiger. Over the next twenty years Chabry, Oskar Hert
wig, Edmund Wilson, and several others added new fuel to
the fire.
When embryologists discovered in the egg's first blas
tomeres what they called a "total potentiality," by which
they meant a capacity to influence the development of each
82 part in keeping with the structure of the whole, they com
plemented and confirmed what physiologists already knew,
namely, that there exist organic functions whose purpose
is to control other functions and thus, by regulating certain
invariants, to enable the organism to comport itself as a
whole. In the last third of the nineteenth century these
functions were designated "regulatory" functions. This
choice of name culminated a long and difficult history of
conceptual change, a history that is not easily recounted.
Time was introduced into physiology by way of meta
phors, long before the functions designated by those met
aphors had been subjected to the kind of comparative
study on which a general theory of regulation and homeo
stasis ought to have been based. This theory in turn in
spired rationalistic metaphors of its own, which would one
day give birth to cybernetics. The line of descent is well
known: Claude Bernard ,qui genuit Cannon qui genuit Ro
senblueth apud Wiener. The word cybernetics, first coined
by Ampere .in l 8 3 4 to denote the science of government,
lay dormant for more than a century, awaiting the theory
that would provide it with a formal concept and enable it
to transcend the limitations of its etymology. \ It was in
cluded �n LittrC's Dictionary of the French Language-in
cludec;l but not defined or used: no citation attests its usage.
The same cannot be said of the word regulation, an
implicit part of today's cybernetics. It can be found in the
last volume of LittrC's Dictionary, published in 1 8 7 2, pre
ceded by a sign indicating that it was not included in the
Dictionary of the Academy. It follows the word regulateur,
whose meaning in applied mechanics (definition 5 ) is am
plified in the "Additions and Corrections" at the end of the
work; these modifications were incorporated in the entry
in the 1 877 edition. The three citations given :in support of
the definition of "regulatory action," from nineteenth
century texts by Poncelet, de Faye, and Dup�y de Lome,
concern thermal processes in the sun and regulatory de-
TRIUMPHS OF BIOLOGICAL RATIONALITY

83 vices for controlling machinery. Littre might have given a
physiological definition of regulateur, because the word
was used by Flourens in 1 8 231 and Claude Bernard in
1 8 67 in this sense, but he could not have done so for reg
ulation, a word that Bernard appears to have used for the
first time in l 878, and then only incidentally.
The Oxford English Dictionary, which covers the sev
enteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in full, and
which contains many more citations under "regulation"
and "regulator" than Littre, reports only the political and
mechanical senses of the word.
Thus we cannot write the history of regulation with
out writing the history of "regulators," which will take us
into questions of theology, astronomy, technology, medi
cine, and even sociology at its inception. It is- a history in
which Newton and Leibniz are no less implicated than
Watt and Lavoisier, Malthus and Auguste Comte.
I THE PHYSICOTHEOLOGY OF REGULATION
In the preface to the Theodicy (1710), Leibniz gives an ar

gument for God's wisdom based on his theory of kinetic
energy and the laws of motion. In it, he cites as proof the
existence of organisms, that is, of preformed and pre
ordained mechanisms, which man imitates when he con
structs automata. He then cites an example that is best not
read with modern (i.e., post-1948) eyes, despite our temp
tation to do so: Bayle, he says, "was not yet disposed to
believe that God, with all his power over nature and all his
prescience of accidents that may occur, could have ar
ranged things so that, because of the laws of mechanics
alone, a vessel (for example) ·would go to the port toward
which it was destined without being governed en route by
some intelligent director." But Leibniz, citing the perfection
of various automata? argues that a mind finite but far su-
BIOLOGICAL REGULATION
84 perior to our own could do what Bayle believed God could
not. Hence, "since God regulates everything in advance,
the accuracy of the ship's course would be no more strange
than that of a rocket following a rope in a fireworks dis
play, all the regulations of all things being perfectly har
monious among themselves, and determining one another
mutually."
The Theodicy, which antedates the first article of the
controversy with Clarke by five years, sums up a theory of
the relation between God and the world at odds with that
of Newton and his disciples, who believed that God, after
creating the world, continued to watch over it and interfere
providentially and that, because of the interplanetary void,
movement in the world tended to diminish. By contrast,
Leibniz's world was immutable, } regulated by virtue of its
original creation.
Leibniz's attachment to the idea of conservative regu
lation shows that, while he opposed Descartes on the ques
tion of teleology, implicit in the concept of "regulation of
all things," he was nevertheless a Cartesian in that he de
fended a law of conservation in opposition to Newton : But
it was another opponent of Newtonian physics who un
wittingly provided Leibniz with an explicit model of uni
versal regulation by inventing in r 67 5 the regulator spiral
(the word regulator being mentioned in Harris's Lexicon
technicum in r 7 04). For Descartes, the clock w.�-�- rhe
_
model for the animal machine. After Huygens's invention�

the regulator watch became a model for the universe. Leib
niz mentioned it whenever he became irritated by the nat
ural theology of the Cambridge School, whenever he
fulminated against Newton and the Newtonians or against
Cudworth's "plastic natures" or the idea of God, "King or ·
Governor," proposed by Clarke at the end of his first re
sponse. The word governor, before Watt and Maxwell used
it as a technical term equivalent to regulator, was used by
Cudworth as the first term of a series that is worth quot-

85 ing: "He did not only assert God to be the Cause of mo
tion,, but also the Governour, Regulator, and Methodizer
of the same" (Intellectual System, 1768) . For Newton,
God did not simply build and calibrate a reliable mecha
nism that He then allowed to run on its own; rather He
permanently surveyed the operation of the machine, so
that His Sensorium (space) could inform him of any devia
tions from the norm, which could then be corrected by His
Providence.
According to Leibniz, "Mr. Newton and his support
ers once again have a curious opinion of God's work. .Ac
cording to them, God needs to reset his watch occasionally:
Otherwise it would cease to work. He was no� farseeing
enough to equip it with a perpetual movement. God's ma
chine on their view is even so imperfect that he is obliged
to clean it every now and then by an extraordinary inter
vention, and even to repair it, as a watchmaker might re
pair his work" (first article against Clarke, 171 5 ) .
Although Leibniz here seems to attach more weight to the
perpetuity of the mechanism than to its regularity, Clarke
chooses at the end of his first response to take up the latter
issue, rejecting the notion that God is merely a nominal or,
as Alexandre Koyre put it, an "idle" king. Leibniz's rejoin
der is of the utmost importance for the history of the idea
of regulation: "The comparison with a King in whose
realm all would go well without his interference is not rel
evant, for God always conserves things, which could not
subsist without him. Thus his Kingdom is not a kingdom
in name only. To argue the contrary is exactly the same as
to argue that a King who had educated his Subjects and
preserved their capacities and good will by taking care of
their subsistence so well that he never needed to reprove
their behavior is a King in name only" (Leibniz's second
article, par. 2). Still more vigorously: "When I said that
God attended to such disorders by providing remedies in
advance, I did not mean that God allowed the disorders to
86 occur and then applied the remedies but that he found
ways to prevent them from occurring at all" (third article,
par. 1 4 ) .
Leibniz held that regulation (in the sense of governing
a state or regulating a machine) is the same as a rule, in the
sense of a static property that is built into a machine or
system from the beginning. There is no disparity between
rule and regularity. Regularity is not obtained as an effect
of regularization; it is not a triumph over instability or a
recovery after degradation. Rather, it is an inherent prop
erty. A rule is a rule and always remains so; its regulatory
function, never actually invoked, remains latent.
Leibniz's view apparently exerted great influence on
later thinkers. For a century and a q alf, questions concern
ing regulators and regulation in mechanics, physiology,
economics, and politics were posed in terms of conserva
tion and equilibrium, owing to the apparent victory of
Leibnizian optimism over Newtonian anxieties as to the
permanence of the cosmic order. Those anxieties were
summed up by Clarke in his second response (par. 8) : "The
present state of the Solar System, for example, according
to the laws of motion that are now established, will one
day fall into confusion, and then it may be redressed or it
may receive a new form."
Koyre has shown how repeated verification of New
ton's theory over the course of the eighteenth century
proved that the composition of the world was more stable
than Newton thought and that Leibniz was therefore cor
rect. 2 Laplace's Exposition of the System of the World re
lieved Newton's God of all obligation to govern the world.
It was no longer God but a principle that regula.!_ed _!he
solar system: "We have just set forth the principal results
of the world system following the simplest and niost direct
analytical order. We first considered the appearances of the
motion of the heavens, and comparing these led us to the
real motions that cause them. In order to attain the regu-

87 latory principle of those motions, laws of motion of matter
were needed, and we developed them at length" (preface
to the sixth edition, l 8 3 5 ) .
Thus a cosmology sans theology for a long time gave
credence to the Leibnizian idea of regulation, understood
as the conservation of initial constants. This controlling
schema, not to say paradigm, lay behind what Michel Fou
cault has called the "enunciative regularities" of an era in
which both political economy (Ricardo) and physiology
(Magendie) took as their object systems over which history
and its vagaries held no sway. What little Newtonian cos
mology might have to say about duration and evolutionary
erosion was obscured by admiration for the theory of uni
versal gravitation. The prestige of principles of conserva
tion was such that even after Clausius had revived Sadi
Carnot, it took a good half century for biologists to begin
to think of organic regulation in terms of adaptation and
not just in terms of conservation or restoratiOn of a closed
system.
II ECONOMY, TECHNOLOGY, AND PHYSIOLOGY
No name is innocent. ' When the English physician Wal

ter Charleton (1619-1707) published, in the same year
( 1 65 9), both the Natural History of Nutrition,· Life, and
Voluntary Motion, Containing All New Discoveries of
Anatomy Concerning Oeconomy of Human Nature and its
Latin translation, Exercitationes de oeconomeia animalis,
he gave his sanction to the exchange if not of good meth
ods then at least of bad analogies between the study of the
organism and the study of society: From then until the time
of Claude Bernard the term animal economy denoted the
physiologist's area of concern. 3
Although physicians, naturalists, and even philoso
phers viewed the concept of animal economy as being
88 equivalent to that of the �i�-�ip.��])i_�e (Buffon, Lavoi
sier) or animal factory (Hume, Dialogues on Natural Re
ligion), implicit within it was always the concept of a
regulation of the various organ parts or functions, a coor
dination of varied activities for the common good. The
early-nineteenth-century concept of a physiological divi
sion of labor was a derivative of the concept of animal
economy, an ambiguous notion that embraced both tech
nical structure and domestic or political regulation.
Hence it is not surprising that any advance in mechan
ical technology that made machines more "organic," that
is, apparently more similar to organ systems whose oper
ation seemed to be controlled from within, provided phys
iologists with new models for und4rstanding the animal
functions. In this way the term "regulator" was introduced
into the physiologist's lexicon in the eighteenth century.
In �ngland, the history of regulators or governors in
the sense of devices for controlling the operation of ma
chinery was associated with the history of mining and mill
ing (Savery, The Miner's Friend, 1 702) . Stuart, in his
Descriptive History of the Steam Engine, and Arago, in his
Eloge historique de James Watt ( 1 8 3 4), reported that Watt
discovered the principle of his centrifugal governor by
studying flour mills, some of which had two heavy weights
attached to the shaft of the millstone.
In France, the term regulateur, in the sense of a spiral
spring, was found in both Saverien's Dictionnaire universe/
de mathematique et de physique and in the Encyclopedia.
In addition to mechanics and watchmaking, the con
cept and the term regulation were also used in the field of
artificial navigation, that is, the art of adjusting the water
level in canals in order to make them navigable. Although
the word does not appear in Belidor's Architecture hydrau
lique ( 1 7 3 7-3 9) or Lalande's Des canaux de navigation
( 1 778), it can be found in Zendrini's Leggi e fenomeni, re
golazioni ed usi delle acque correnti (Venice: 1 761) and

89 several times in General Andrfossy's Histoire du Canal du
Midi (1799).
Of course it was Watt's governor that most aptly ex
emplified the feedback mechanisms at work in living or
ganisms. Metaphors from economic management . ..�n,.d
steam-engine technology were widely accepted in physiol
ogy in part for reasons having to do with the history of
physiology itself. In mechanics, whether terrestrial or ce
lestial, naive observations of falling bodies and planetary
motion did not of themselves lead to Descartes's vortex hy
pothesis or Newton's law of gravitation. But in medicine
people fell ill and recovered all the time, and it was there
fore natural to assume that the organism has some inherent
power of restitution or reintegration. This accounts for a
trait shared by all eighteenth-century medical theories ex
cept that of John Brown, who premised his therapeutic ac
tivism on a supposed identity between life and external
stimulation. All other medical theories took the existence
of the vis medicatrix naturae to be the most indubitable
fact of life. Some, like Stahl, raised it to a level of ontolog
ical dignity equivalent to that of the reasonable soul, while
· others, . like Boyle and Hoffmann, reduced it to what they
believed to be crude mechanisms (in the case of Hoffmann,
for example, the circulation of blood). But in any case they
all approved Hippocrates for having recognized that living
things possess powers of self-preservation, which Hippoc
rates ascribed to what he called Nature. In an era long be
fore the existence of self-regulatory mechanisms, antitoxic
defenses, or spontaneous immunization could be demon
strated by experimental means, Stahl and the Stahlians
spoke instead of the "autocracy of Nature." ,�n passing, it
is worth noting that Stahl's influence on the physicians of
the Montpellier School, with the probable exception of
Bordeu, led to the emergence of an antimechanist, naturist
dogmatism that seriously impeded experimental research
in physiolog O
,
90 A paradoxical aspect of the relation betw�en philoso-
phy and medicine at the time was Leibniz's oppositio�JQ
Stahl's animism and approval of the mechanism of his
Halle colleague Frederick Hoffmann. But Leibniz, as we
saw earlier, refused to acknowledge that the c�n��rvation
of a material system could be ascribed to a power external
to its original composition. That a body susceptible to
rapid decay by virtue of its chemical composition should
have been preserved from corruption by a conservative
soul was no more acceptable to Leibniz than the idea that
God is Lord of the World, ready to intervene to repair its
defects wherever they may appear. In the polemic between
Leibniz and Stahl, among Leibniz's d9ubts and refutations,
to which Stahl responded in his Negotium otiosum, is a
passage worthy of attention, for it reveals the emergence
of a new model of the organism in addition to the clock
and the watch. "That the animal body is a hydraulic
pneumatic heat engine is doubted by scarcely anyone any
more except those whose minds are filled with chimerical
principles such as divisible souls, plastic natures, inten
tional species, operative ideas, hylarchic principles and
other archies that mean nothing unless they are resolved
into mechanics" ( Opera omnia, Dutens edition, vol. 2, part
2, p. 149) .
Lavoisier was the first to compare this engine's prop
erties with respect to maintenance, conservation, and rep
aration with those of a mechanical regulator. The exp_li9.t
use of the term and concept of a "regulator," the compar
ison of the animal machine not just to a set of tools or
mechanisms but to a motor, and the adumbration of a no
tion of physiological work make the Memoirs on the Res
piration and Perspiration of Animals ( 1 789 -1 790) and,
even more, the papers that Lavoisier wrote jointly with Se
guin the first scientific treatises on regulation. These inter
esting documents were mentioned briefly by Charles
Daremberg in his History of the Medical Sciences ( 1 870,
I '
91 p. ror6) and analyzed in detail by Fran�ois Jacob in the
Logic of Life. According to Lavoisier and Seguin, "The an
imal machine is principally governed by three main regu
l�tors." Note the conf�nction of the terms government and
- regu lator/,.The three regulators are respiration, which pro
duces animal heat; perspiration, which m·aintains the body
temperature at the level "fixed by nature" ; and digestigm
which restores to the blood' what is lost through respira
tion and perspiration.
Note, further, the terms that Lavoisier uses to describe
the effects of these regulators on the animal economy. He
speaks of disturbances of equilibrium, of the reestablish
ment of equilibrium, of equilibrium and regularity, of var
iable means whose effects compensate one another, of
extraordinary means of compensation, and of health, a
state in which nature's compensatory mechanisms work
easily and effortlessly. A hundred year� later Claude Ber
nard used precisely the same terms. Although Lavoisier
was well ahead of his medical contemporaries, he was
nevertheless a man of his century, for he saw his theory of
three regulators as yet another confirmation of the Hippo
cratic principle: "From this it should be apparent that the
art of medicine often consists in allowing nature to grapple
with herself." Hence despite two passages in which the idea
of an aleatory relation between the organism and its envi
ronment seems to be indicated, Lavoisierian regulation is
strictly conservative. Though man may "plunge into what
ever circumstances hazard may take him . . . the system of
general freedom that nature appears to have wanted to es
tablish in all that pertains to living things" is nothing but
an aspect of "the physical order, subject to immutable
laws, and long since established in a state of equilibrium
that nothing can disturb." Thus, nature "has set regulators
everywhere." And since Lavoisier contin_ued, like Buffon
and the Encyclopedists as well as all the physicians of the
��j�_ri. t� j6ip.k ?� th� organism as both a machine and
92 a_!l economy, he, like Charleton in the dedication to his
Oeconomia animalis, argued that the theory o_f the ��ga
nism has implications for the theory of society. "The moral
order, like the physical order, has its regulators: if it were
otherwise, human societies would have ceased to exist long
ago, or, rather, they never would have come into being"
(see the end of the treatise on perspirati(\n).
Compensation and conservation are laws that govern
not merely individual organisms but life in all its aspects.
To appreciate fully the scope of the concept of biological
regulation in the eighteenth century, we must consider Buf
fon's question of the "quantity of life," which he answered
by arguing that organic molecules ire indestructible and
that their number remains constant, as well as Linnaeus's
question as to the "quantity of living things," which was
answered by Linnaeus and his disciples in Oeconomia na
turae ( 1 749) and Politia naturae ( 1 760) . Plant and animal
species are maintained in their initial proportions, and an
equilibrium is established between pr.opagation, conserva
tion of structure and way of life, and destruction of surplus
individuals by dearth of nourishment or predation. Ca
mille Limoges has shown that Linnaeus borrowed the idea
of a "balance of nature" from the English theologian Der
ham (Physico-Theology, l 7 1 3 ), who frequently invoked
Newton in his sermons to justify physical conditions or
biological adaptations in terms of divine choice. 4 To refer
to the divine author of the law of conservation in animal
demography Linnaeus used an expression that neither
Cudworth nor Newton would have disavowed: "The Sov
ereign Moderator" (par. 20) . Linnaeus's idea of a balance
of species within a habitat was thus in no way a pr�cu��
of the theory of ecological equilibrium, which makes sense
only in the context of a post-Darwinian the9ry of the geo
graphical distribution of organisms and of the precarious
and changing relations among populations engaged in �he
- -,- ·- -------
struggle for survival.

93 Q' rom Linnaeus to Malthus was but a short step, how-
ever, and althpugh it cannot be said that the Economy of
Nature propc!ed a pre-Malthusian doctrine of population,
Malthus did extend to man and to human society ques
tions concerning the proportion of the earth's surface oc
cupied by living things relative to size of the food supply.
This was a subject on which the regulators of the moral
order found it possible to join forces with the regulators of
�
the physical order envisioned by Lavoisie Leaving aside
its mathematical formulation, Malthus's problem was the
following: How could a tendency be made compatible
with a limit? How could two aspects of nature-the mul
tiplication of living things and the limited amount of avail
able space and food-be reconciled? Among animals,
excesses of population were eliminated hr. death. Among
men, destruction also played a part, but it would be emi
nently humane to limit its role by taking preventive steps.
Constraint is the way to impede growth. Constraint was
what Malthus called the voluntary renunciation of one of
the penchants that holds the greatest sway over us. But
what can persuade man to accept a painful constraint ex
cept prudence, that is, a calculation of self-interest? This
was what Malthus called regularizing the principle of pop
ulation. Once again we find the principle of Hippocratic
medicine invoked by allusion in Malthus's expression for a
mechanism of social regulation: "The great vis medicatrix
rei publicae, the desire to improve one's lot and the fear of
making it worse, has never ceased to guide men in the
straight and narrow, despite all the arguments that would
tend to make them abandon it. This powerful principle of
health . . ." et cetera. Was it not logical to think that a pro
cess conceived to be natural and not historical, "a law in
its broad outlines exactly like all the other laws of nature,"
the growth of the population, could be regulated only by a
power inherent in human nature as it was conceived in util
itarian psychology? Yet the belief that there was a social
94 stabilization mechanism that could be called a "principle
of health" and that operated by reducing deviations from
the norm neglected the fact that the meaning of another
Hippocratic notion, that of "crisis," as it applied to society
was undergoing a change at precisely the moment ,
in his-
tory when the Industrial Revolution in England and the
political revolution in France were forcing social science to
substitute history for nature and conflict for equilibrium.
III REGULATION BY THE EXTERI 9R AND

REGULATION BY THE INTERIOR:
AUGUSTE COMTE AND CLAUDE BERNARD
Why make a place for Auguste Comte in the history of

biology? Because his biological philosophy inspired and
deeply influenced a school of physicians, members of
which (Robin and Segond) in 1 84 8 founded the Society for
Biology of which Claude Bernard became a member. And
because the research program that they proposed to the
society, in particular, the study of environments for which
they coined the term mesology, suggests that a certain ori
entation within biology posed an obstacle to the elabora
tion of the concept of physiological regulation.
Auguste Comte was a man of the eighteent� _century
who happened to live in the nineteenth. A graduate of the
Ecole Polytechnique, he was a Newtonian thanks to the
influence of Laplace. Born in Montpellier, he became an
adept of Hippocrates thanks to the influence of the medical
school located there. These allegiances were responsible
for two constants in the thought of a man who used and
abused the words regulate and regulator:
r . It is the exterior, Comte held, that regulates the inte
rior. It is the stability of the solar system which, through
the mediation of environments, stabilizes living systems.

95 2. Human history is.lnothing but the development of a
seed, the realization of human nature. Progress is nothing
but the development of order.
To justify the first proposition one would have to cite
in their entirety the parts of Comte's Course in Positive Phi
losophy relative to astronomy (lectures 19-27) and biol
ogy (lectures 40-47), as well as lecture 49 on the necessary
relations between social physics and the other fundamental
branches of positive philosophy. Perforce I shall limit my
self to quoting a few of the denser and more significant
passages, confirmed by references to the System of Positive
Politics (lecture 40, 3 .208 ) :
We now know that the state of life by its very nature pre
supposes a fundamental harmony between the organism
that benefits from it and the environment in which it comes
to fruition . . . . Now, it is clear that if the earth's elliptical
orbit were not nearly circular but as eccentric as the orbit
of the comets in the proper sense of the word, then organic
environments, and the organism itself, assuming it did ex
ist, would have to endure over a lengthy period of time
almost infinite variations that would in all respects vastly
exceed the most generous limits within which it is actually ·
possible to conceive of life.5
The dynamical characteristics of the solar system,
which Newton attributed to God, were explained in
Comte's day by theorems of Lagrange, Laplace, and Poin
sot pertaining to the invariance of the major axes of plan
etary orbits and their orbital planes. These solutions of
perturbation problems guaranteed that "the set of stars
can only oscillate slowly around the mean, from which it
varies only by a small amount" (lecture 26, 2, p. 175). For
Comte it was the invariance of the solar system that was
responsible, in the final analysis, for invariants in biology,
society, and psychology. Maqness occurs when "the out
side cannot regulate the inside" (Systeme de politique pos
itive, henceforth abbreviatel SPP, 3 . 20.2) . Comte always
96 refused to accept materialism, which is to say the reduction
of the superior to the inferior, and he wished to attribute a
certain spontaneity to living systems. This prevented him,
despite his admiration for Lamarck, from accepting any
theory in which the organism was determined by the envi
ronment, for this would be tantamount to a resurrection
of "Cartesian automatism . . . [which is] ruled out by the
facts" (SPP, i . 602) .
In the "continuous cooperation between fatality and
spontaneity, the sources, respectively, of constancy and var
iation" (ibid., 44 1 ), variation is subordinate to and regu
lated by constancy. "Living things can live only in inert
environments, which provide them with both a seat and
nourishment" (ibid., 44 0). Variability is limited by the pre
ponderance of the inert environment, without which "nat
ural variations would grow indefinitely and all notion of
law would quickly vanish, for the true nature of law lies in
constancy of relations" (ibid.). Even religion, whose func
tion Comte explains in terms of a dubious etymology (re
g/er, to regulate individual existence, + rallier, to win the
allegiance of diverse individuals), merely reflects and cele
brates the influence of the "external economy" over our
feelings, concepts, and behavior (SPP, 2. 1 8 ) . An "admi
rable word," religion reminds us "that true unity consists
in constraining (lier) what lies within and linking (relier) it
to what lies without" (ibid.). Hence the positivist theory qf
the social organism ascribes to (positivist) religion the
function of "social regulator" (SPP, 2.306, 308)°:·
\. ·-rn sum, for Comte a living system is a system open to
the outside world, upon which it depends for nourishment
of its so-called vegetative functions and for the information
required by the animal functions that in one way or an
other serve the vegetative (lecture 40, 2.1 5,6 ). "The envi
ronment therefore constitutes the principal regulator of the
organism" (SPP, 2.26). What is positive for. the organism
is the constancy of the environment, which extends to the

�
97 organic world the principles of conservation known to be
true in celestial mechanics. Regulation comes from above
and from outside, even when it seems to be a function of
the organism itself: "Since the great Hippocrates it has
been known that life is characterized above all by universal
�
consensus, which must therefore prevail primarily in the
apparatus specially designed to regularize it everywhere,"
namely, the brain (SPP, i .726). And Comte has already
shown that the preeminent function of the brain is to reg
ulate the internal so as to ensure its harmony with the
external.
In l 8 5 l Comte wrote, "Although the structure of the
liver is now known in minute detail, its vegetative function
is hardly less obscure than before" (SPP, i .730). Yet in
1 849 Claude Bernard had published his Memoir on the
Origin of Sugar in the Organism. Comte died in l 8 5 7, two
years after Bernard, in a lecture on experimental physiol
ogy at the College de France, used the words "internal se
cretion" in speaking of the glycogenic function of the liver,
a function that seemed paradoxical to many of his contem
poraries. In 1 8 59, in his Lectures on the Physiological
Properties and Pathological Alterations of the Liquids of
the Organism, Bernard extended th� idea of internal secre
tions to the so-called sanguineous glands (spleen, thyroid,
adrenals, etc.), whose functions were as yet undetermined.
These discoveries were necessary but not sufficient for the
elaboration of the concept of the "internal environment,"
the importance and originality of which was stressed in the
Introduction ( 1 8 65), the Report ( 1 8 67), and the Lectures
on Common Phenomena ( 1 878). According to Grmek, the
expression "internal liquid environment" appears for the
first time in l 8 5 7 in an unpublished draft of a lecture. 6 In
the Report (p. 1 82) Bernard says that "as far as I am
aware, I am the first to distinguish between an internal en
vironment and an external environment."
In fact, Bernard conceived of the internal environment
98 primarily as a reservoir of energy for the cells of the body.
It was Brown Sequard who, in 1 89 1 , proposed the idea of
a transmission of chemical messages via substances that
did not receive the name hormones until l 90 5'· In other
words, Bernard did not ascribe to the mechanism he had
discovered a role comparable to that of the nervous system
in coordinating the various cells of the organism.7
It may have been because he attributed a special role
to the central and sympathetic nervous system that Ber
nard, who was the first to attach positive content to the
concept of physiological regulation, used the terms regu
lator and regulation quite sparingly, and only, it seems, in
connection with the circulation of the blood and the phe
nomenon of "calorification." The Lectures on Diabetes
and Animal Glycogenesis ( 1 877) contain such terms as
brake, moderator, and antagonism (pp. 398, 45 1), main
tenance and regulatory function (p. 420 ), law regulating
glycemic oscillations (p. 408), and the phrase "physiologi
cal oscillation, a sort of perpetual, unstable equilibrium"
(p. 4 1 3 ).
In the Lectures on Phenomena of Life Common to An
imals and Plants ( 1 878) Bernard distinguishes between la
tent life, oscillating life, and free or constant life � The latter
depends on stability of the internal environment, which is
ensured by functions of compensation and equilibration;
the words equilibrium, compensation, and balance are
used ( r . 1 14). The phrase calorific regulation appears in the
discussion of calorification ( r . n 7), probably as a result of
an unconscious analogy with what was called at the time
a "thermorheostat" (cf. Littre, Dictionnaire, vol. 4, 1 872).
The word regulator occurs several times in Lectures on An
imal Heat ( 1 876), where it is used in explaining the func
tions of the sympathetic nervous system in glandular
secretions and the circulation of the blood. Better yet, in
1 867 Bernard reported the discovery, ''t�nparalleled in
physiology, of a nervous autoregulator that determines the

99 work of the heart and the force of the resistance that it
must overcome." This was in a communication to the
Academy of Sciences concerning the discovery by Elie de
Cyon and Carl Ludwig of a cardiac depressor nerve
( I 8 66). Following the identification by the Weber brothers
in I845 of the vagus nerves, which moderate the contrac
tion of the heart, and by the Cyon brothers in I866 of the
sympathetic accelerator nerves, the discovery of the de
pressor nerve completed the picture of a physiological
feedback mechanism, what Bernard called an autoregula
tor. As in the case of calorification, a technological analogy
suggested the idea of a "pressure regulator" (18 7 6). To
sum up, the only regulatory mechanism so named by Ber
nard was the nervous one that he helped bring to light.
�
Such internal regulatory mechanisms were quite dif-
ferent from regulation in Comte's sense. For Comte, regu
lation extended to the organism the benefits of a stabilized
and stabilizing external environment. For Bernard, regu
lation referred to a mechanism for stabilizing internal con
ditions within limits necessary for the cells of the body to
survive. It enabled the organism to confront the hazards of
the environment by compensating for deviations from the
norm.8
IV THE CONCEPTUAL ADVANCE OF GERMAN

PHYSIOLOGY
In I 840, J.-B. Biot, summarizing Lavoisier's work on res

piration, alluded to the "three principal regulators" of the
animal machine, yet he was unable to conceptualize or
name a phenomenon in animal economy for which he
nevertheless provides a quite lucid description:
One of the most admirable properties of living organisms
is their obvious ability to modify within broad limits the
interaction of their various mechanisms without impeding
roo their continued cooperation in producing the desired ef
fect. It is this ability that enables life to persist and main
tain itself in the face of continually changing influences
from external physical agents. Respiration, like all other
animal functions, continues to operate in very a iverse
physical circumstances and, what is more, adjusts and con
forms to changing circumstances almost instant3neously.9
Two years later, in 1 8 4 2, Hermann Lotze ( 1 8 1 7-
1 8 8 1 ), in an article entitled "Leben, Lebenskraft" ("Life,
Life Force") for Wagners Handworterbuch der Physiolo
gie, routinely employed the term regulation to refer to a
mechanism for compensating perturbations (Storungen) by
nervous feedback (Ruckwirkung) . He resorts to irony to
underscore the purely deterministic nature of this function
( eine gesetzmassige Regulation) : " Once again we are per
mitted to ask for the impossible, namely, that the vital
force in the manner of a supreme proctor not only decide
what is appropriate but also carry it out." This forgotten
text of Lotze's, whose Die Medizinische Psychologie oder
Physiologie des Seele ( 1 8 5 2) is usually cited, was noticed
by K. E. Rothschuh in a valuable article on the history of
biological regulation.10 Lotze exhibits the predilection of
German physiologists for the study of the functions of the
nervous system that led Carl Ludwig and Elie de Cyron to
discover the role of the depressor · nerve in regulating the
output of the heart, a predilection that made their work
easy for Claude Bernard to assimilate.
After Bernard the word regulation entered the com
__
ip.qn vocabulary of physiology. When a word appears in

the title of a book or paper, it has been recognized as more
than a mere metaphor by the competent scientific commu
nity. In 1 8 8 2, for example, Leon Fredericq of Liege pub
lished a paper "On the Regulation of Temperature in
Warm-Blooded Animals," and in 1901 Emile Achard pub
lished "The Regulato�y Mechanism of the Composition of
the Blood." With the latter work we return to our original ·

101 starting date, the �r in which Driesch's book was pub
lished. By now the range of biological functions to which
the concept of regulation was applied had broadened to
the point where one could speak of "regulations" in the
plural, and it was the plural that occurred in Driesch's title,.
indicating the new scope of the underlying concept and im
plying that some temporary consensus had been achieved
as to its meaning. Regulation, having begun as a purely
mechanical concept, had become a biological concept as
well. Later, through the mediation of homeostasis, it
would become a concept of cybernetics.
Notes
l
"Recherches sur les proprietes et les fonctions du systeme nerveux

dans les animaux vertebres, Arch. Gen. Med. 2('z823):32z-3 70.
This article was later expanded into the book Recherches experi
mentales, published in 1 8 24. Georges Cuvier, in reviewing Flour
ens,s work on the control of locomotion by the cerebellum, used
the same word, regulateur, in his Histoire des progres des sciences
· naturelles depuis z789 jusqu'a ce jour ( 1 8 34), vol. 4, pp. 41, r o r ,
148.
2
See Etudes newtoniennes (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 40: "The
development of Ne,wtonian science itself . . . left less and less
room for divine intervention. . . . Thus the God of Descartes and
Leibniz, so bitterly contested by the Newtonians, had nothing
more to do in this world."
3
Cf. Bernard Balan, "Premieres recherches sur l'origine et la for-
mation du concept d'economie animale," Revue d'histoire des sci
ences 28.4(1975 ) : 289 -:3 26.
4 .
Camille Limoges, introduction to C. Linne, Equilibre de la Na-
ture (Paris: Vrin, 1972) .
5
References are to the Schleicher edition (Paris: I 908) .
6
"Evolution des conceptions de Claude Bernard sur le milieu in
tfaieur," Philosophie et methodologie scienti'fiques de Claude Ber
nard (Paris: Masson, 1967), p. 1 23 .
102 7
Ibid., p. J40.
8
"The organism is an equilibrium. The moment a chaqge alters its
balance, another change comes to reestablish it." See ibid., p.
140.
9
"Recherches chimiques sur la respiration des animaux par M. M.
Regnault et Reiser ( 1 840)," Memoires scientifiques et litteraires,
vol. 2 ( r 8 5 8 ), pp. 220-22r .
IO
"Historische Wurzeln der Vorstellung einer selbsttatigen infor
mationsgesteuerten biologischen Regelung," Nova acta Leopol
dina 206: 9 1-106, with bibliography. Among the works cited is
the fine article by E. F. Adolph, "Early Concepts of Physiologi
cal Regulation," Physiology Reviews 4 1 (1961 ) : 737-770. But
Adolph seems less impressed than Rothschuh and I with Lotze,s
originality.

5 On the History of the Life Sciences since
Darwin
Sigmund Freud compared the scandal caused by the first

public revelations of psychoanalytic theory to the early
scandals provoked by Galilean cosmology in the seven
teenth century and by Darwinian biology in the nineteenth
century. And it is quite true that in all three cases man was
· stripped of a comforting illusion: that he occupied the cen
ter of the universe, that his genealogical ancestry was
unique, and that his self-consciousness . o.ffered a compre
hensive view of the recesses of his mind.
As far as the methodology of the history of science is
concerned, there is food for thought in the sequence and
relation of the first two of these disillusionments. When the
Origin of Species appeared in 1 8 59, it was 1 72 years since
Newton's Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis
had furnished a t�eoretical and experimental confirmation
of Galileo's cosmology, the absence of which had until then
troubled some of the finest minds of the seventeenth cen
tury. English theologians were not only not scandalized by
the confirmation of Galileo's hypothesis; they actually used
it as a source of arguments against atheism. Richard Ben
tley in his sermons and William Paley in his dissertations
invoked Newton in support of natural theology whenever
a phenomenon seemed to depend upon an arrangement of ,
1 04 its constituent elements or the laws of nature seemed to
express God's decision or the relation of man Iand other
living species to the environment seemed to be the result of
an adaptation designed by an omnipotent a�d solicitous
will. For Newton had said that "the infinite Being governs
all, not as the Soul of the World but as the Lord of all
: things." Echoes of this providentialism can be found even
LJ.!!._the writings of eighteenth-century atheists.
thus !he. ultimate _effects of the heliocentric cosmol
Qgy, �he theo�etif�l consequences of the first deteai ofan
thr�poc�ntrism, paradoxically delayed an d imp eded the
second,
- as a result of which man would be obliged to take
_i his piace as a subject in a kingdom, the anl��l kingdom,
. -
()_twhich __he had pr�viously posed as monaFch by di��!1e
ggh.!�_ Indeed, as Charles Gillispie and Camille Limoges
have shown, the idea of a transformation of species by ran
dom adaptation to the constraints of the environment
1 based on individual reproductive differences was incon
-
; ceivable until a previous idea, that of a preordained adap-
-
tation of each species to its way of life, had been destroyed.
Before Darwin,
- living things were thotJght- to. be. confined
· -
. : to -i.hei� P��rdained ecological niche on pain -�( a��th .
-
' ! i
f
(k) 3 f ·· : · i ; .
Where conditions were right they multlplie<( � iie ��;here
else. It was a radical innovation to suggest that living crea
tures multiply without necessarily maintaining the identity
of their species in every respect and that, taking account of
their large numbers and individual differences, they were
obliged to live where they could best endure, with no re
served place and no assurance of survival. Epitomized by
-
the n��-ofDa(win, thi.Hheory of adaptation, whlch oon
t�cted the very e.!.Y�ology -�T1:h.e�worcr�-wa:s· a revolu
tio;:iary c'l��i�p ��t'. It �e�alliecHi1�;;�"fiViilJle untiC�e
-
-
�£ the r�fi��ri� ns of N e�o� ��,.: s.r�;y hacCb.eeri enlfpatecl
· · �
�� \ ;!�:�!i::�:��l��=�:=��:��:��;t:
�p(
1 05 i ogy. The history of science should make us aware that
s�i�ntific discoveries in ?ne field, �f degraded into ideolo-
/
_
g1es, can impede theoretical work m other fields .
......._
. ___ Sometimes, however, theoretical work itself initially
1. takes an ideological form, expecially in fields where exper
imental proof is,.�Jong_tiIQ�ming. This is what happened

: in the case of(fi. atural selection. Never mind that the con-
--- ·- ___ ..... ___,,
i cept was mistakentor an unfortunate importation into
(
,::, J ( , r a l biological theory of techniques of husbandry. Worse, Dar-
(\'
1 " win's idea of a struggle for survival was incorporated into
S�":·,
:· '. ''; , what appeared at first to be a cosmological theory but
· · ·
; eventually revealed itself to be fundamentally political and
ideological: Herbert Spencer's evolutionism. Any history
of the life sciences since Darwin must take account of the
. fact that, unlike the theory of gravitation, the theory of
! natural selection was initially regarded as an ideology by
. many people, not all of whom were fools. Furthermore,
just as Newtonian cosmology ultimately justified Galileo's
bold speculations, so too has population genetics con
firmed Darwin's ideas in ways that could not have been
foreseen even at the end of the nineteenth cenJ:ury.
Unfortunately, the use of hindsight to bring out the
latent implications of a theory risks making history seem
straightforward and linear when in reality it was far more
complex. After Newton it became Clear that Galileo was
right to have clung stubbornly to his ideas even though he
lacked the means to answer every objection. After Mendel,
Bateson, Morgan, Dobzhansky, and many others, we
know that Darwin was right to have posed the problem of
evolution in terms that he was obliged to invent. In 1 8 7 8,
with confirmation of Darwin's ideas still in the future, an
attentive reader of his work, Friedrich Engels, pointed to
the direction from which proof was likely to come: "Nat
ural organisms have their own laws of population, deter
mination of which will be of tremendous importance for
the theory of the evolution of species. And who gave the
THE LIFE SCIENCES

106 decisive impetus in this very direction? None other than
Darwin himself" (Anti-Duhring, 7).
Eventually this expectation was satisfied, but only
\
after a delay, the reasons for which I wish to explore next.
For delay is as much a part of history, even the history of
science, as progress.
What was the state of the life sciences in l 8 5 9 ? By life

sciences I mean general or theoretical biology, not descrip
tive zoology or botany (although by excluding them I of
course mean no disrespect). Apart from the publication of
the Origin of Species, what were the significant events
in biological research? In 1 8 59 Felix Poucher published
Heterogony, or Treatise on Spontaneous Generation, in
which he gathered together a number of arguments to
which Louis Pasteur was already preparing to respond. In
the same year Rudolf Virchow published his Cellular
Pathology, and Gegenbaur was in possession of informa
tion that he would publish only two years later, namely,
that the egg of vertebrates is unicellular. It was also in 1 8 59
that Claude Bernard published his Lectures on the Physi
ological Properties and Pathological Alterations of the Liq
uids of the Organism, in which he refers to the blood as
the "intraorganic environment," the first reference to what
would later become the "internal environment." This work ·
contains descriptions of numerous experiments to analyze
the blood gases, a point that deserves mention only be
cause in the same year in a paper on the same subject Ivan
Setchenov published the results of research carried out
under Carl Ludwig's direction · and in his laboratory using
I!ii
techniques quite different from those of Bern�rd. short,
by I 8 5 9 the following areas of study were already estab.
lished on a firm scientific footing, by which I mean that

107 they were in possession of heuristic principles, operational
concepts, and experimental techniques: (1) the study of the
origin of life from unicellular organisms; (2) the study of
the development and elementary structure of pluricellular
organisms; and ( 3 ) the maintenance and behavior of the
individual organism considered as a whole. But these prin
ciples, concepts, and techniques did not necessarily prepare
scientists to understand or adopt Darwin's approach to the
origin of speciew
To begin with, the mode of thought and working
methods of physiologists made them generally reluctant to
accept Darwin's view of the world of living things. As E.
Mendelsohn and J. Schiller have noted, physiology saw it
self as an a priori ·science having little in commoD; with
Darwinism. It was a laboratory science working with in
dividual cases and interested in determining functional
constants rather than statistical distributions of fluctua
tions. Probabilistic techniques were not part of its arsenal.
Finally, physiology was a science in the process of dis.
covering, thanks to the work of Claude Bernard, the exis
tence of regulatory mechanisms that enabled complex
organisms to achieve relative autonomy with respect to the
external environment.
Similar remarks can be made about the nascent sci
ence of microbiology. By refuting the arguments of the het
erogonists one by one, by using methods proven on
microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, and by demon
strating the prior existence of germs in every instance in
which others had claimed to witness their inception, Pas
teur gave credence not only to the idea that life proceeds
only from other life but also to the further notion that like
produces like and nothing else. Hence he heightened skep
ticism about any doctrine based on the hypothesis of
transmutation.
By contrast, the first generalizations of cell theory and
its extension by Robert Remak to embryonic development
THE LIFE SCIENCES

ro8 were not difficult to square with Darwin's conclusions and
predictions concerning heritability. The fact tha� the devel
opmental process was similar in all orga � ic structures,
whether animal or vegetable, was not a priori incompatible
with the existence of genealogical relations. Rudolf Vir
chow showed an immediate interest in Darwin's ideas. The
principle Omnis cellula e cellula proved to be more open
than Omne vivum ex vivo.
A relation between cell theory and the Darwinian
theory of evolution had been established in embryology,
which von Baer had founded some thirty years earlier with
his theory of parablasts and principle of embryonic simi
larities in organisms of different types. Kolliker made em
bryology a systematically comparative discipline, and
Kovaleski made it a resolutely evolutionary one. In 1 8 8 6
Oskar Hertwig recognized his discipline's debt to von Baer
by using his words as an epigraph to the memorable Trea
tise on Embryology: "Embryology is the torch that illu
minates the study of organized bodies."
The affinity between Darwin and the embryologists
stemmed first of all from the fact that Darwin recognized
that the embryology of his day incorporated the new di
mension that he was attempting to introduce into the sci
ence of biology, namely, time. To be sure, Lamarck had
previously credited cosmic time in all its vastness with the
power to produce the continuous and progressive if some
times irregular series of organized life forms, "from the
most imperfect to the most perfect." But the Origin of Spe
cies proposed a radically new idea, conceiving of time not
as a power but as a factor whose effects could be perceived
directly in distinct but complementary forms: fossiles, em
bryos, and rudimentary organs. The fossile was petrified
time; the embryo, operative tirrie; the rudimet)tary organ,
retarded time. Together these bits of evidence constituted
the archives of biological history, in which the biologist, by .
reading and making comparisons, could seek to establish

109 a· beginning. In the paleontological archive the beginning
was the oldest fossile; in the embryological archive, it was
the common element; in the morphological archive, it was
the most rudimentary manifestation. Conceived in this
way, the old comparative anatomy could be rejuvenated.
The genealogical tree was the basis of the system, not the
consequence. The common ancestor replaced the arche
type. Classification ceased to be a static portrait of coexist
ing forms and became a vast synoptic canvas woven of
threads of time.
Yet this recognition of time as an agent for organizing
.
life forms (by introducing unpredictable but heritable· v;;_
iations in individuals and by randomly preserving some
through a process ambiguously named natural selection
but actually meaning survival of natural ·extermination)
was not as immediately stimulating or convincing as one
might think today, because there was a major gap in
Darwinian theory. By what mechanism were variations in
scribed in existing organisms, and how were they trans
mitted? In other words, the process of heredity was the
great unknown. It is remarkable that so little use was made
by Darwin and his earliest followers 9f the ever-growing
numbers of experimental techniques for studying physio
logical functions, for analyzing fermentations and infec
tions, and for producing anomalies in the development of
the embryo. This was probably because there were few hy
potheses around to suggest experimental techniques of ver
ification. Today, knowing that heredity manifests itself in
the random combination of independent characters, we
can see that there was nothing in the early experiments on
metabolism after which experiments in heredity could have
been modeled.
9n the question of heredity, Darwin, for all his antici
pation of twentieth-century developments, remain.ed_ a _
man o f the eighteenth century. Between Maupertuis and
Darwin there was no real change in the formulation of the
THE LIFE SCIENCES

r ro problem. It was thought that what was transrrtitted from
one generation to the next was a miniature of the individ
ual organism, representative features of which were pre
sumably concentrated in the reproductive cells. Like all his
predecessors, Darwin confounded the two questions of
generation and heredity. Surprisingly, the man who made
such extensive use of data gathered by animal breeders and
horticulturists never thought of using hybridization to
study heredity empirically.
Therein lies a lesson of general import for the history
of science. It was Darwin who said that in order to be a
good observer one needs-: tobe ��odtFieorist. EmPf;i·;�i
-
- - --
data are theoretfr:ally �iis-efess witho U:t--�-· th�{;retical specifi-
cation of the conditions under which the data are valid and
how they ought to be used. In order for science to make
use of data collected in the course of a preexisting practice,
that practice �ust be translated into conceptual terms;
theory must guide practice, not the other way around. The
�
gap between· tlieocy -;�d� p�act!ce -is ,otten wI<le:Yet no
. -
theory ever emerges from empirical practice alone, in biol
ogy or any other science. In the history of medicine from
Robert Koch to this day there are instances in which this
truth has been ignored, flouted, and rejected. And the same
can be said of the history of agronomy.
II
Gregor Mendel succeeded where Charles Darwin failed.

Though long neglected, the importance of Mendel's - work
has now been recognized for more than seventy-five years.
Even more than Leonardo da Vinci, Mendel offers a case
unique in the annals of science. ·
0,.
uppose Darwin had died during the voyage of the
Beagle. A major advance on the question of evolution .

111 would have been made anyway at around the same time
thanks to the work of Alfred Russel Wallace. On occasion
science seems able to dispense with even the most impor
tant of scientists :]!
But suppose that the remarkable papers read by their
author at Briinn in 1 8 6 5 had been destroyed by fire rather
than being preserved and catalogued without being read,
or read without being understood, as actually happened.
In that case the name of Mendel would be remembered
only in the history of his monastery. The laws of genetics
would be what they are, but Mendel's name would not be
invoked to make up for the glory he was denied during his
$
)
"·�
lifetime. Yett ecause Mendel was the first to take the study
of heredity away from the embryologists and make it a
... .. ... ... .

discipline unto itself, and because he formulated after his
own fashion the rules known today as "Mendel's laws,"
/,,. ···
the historian of biology is obli�d to do something.-he.
we@f�
_ ___. _ , _ __ -- ---h �
9LQJ.h!!nv:is� do.._ Jk musLsimJJlta.!!�9Jl�ly_telLnyg

stor�.1-.o.nly.�..P�r!i.�!ly _ov�-��-�p) One is the history of
what happened publicly, that is, the real history of the ori
gin of genetic science, from which Mendel is absent. he ft'
other is the story of thirty years during which Mendel's .
shade remained in suspense. For it was not until those
thirty years had passed that scientists finally learned that
what they had just discovered had been discovered by
someone else thirty years earlier. Only then did Mendel,
absent participant in this tale, learn that he was a Mendel
ian, and, what is more, that he had been right to be one.
Note the different st:;i.tus of the figure of Mendel in
these two histories. In the first Mendel is nonexistent be
cause he played no part, because he failed to make himself
heard. With the possible exception of Ivan Fedorovich
Shmalhausen, none of the few biologists to have read his
work understood it, not even Nageli, and not one of the
adepts of a Darwinism that fairly cried out for con-
THE LIFE SCIENCES

II2 firmation from genetics (as we can now see quite clearly) .
The fact that the purported discoveries of De Vries, Cor
rens, Tschermak, and Bateson were in fact rediscoverie,s
changes nothing in this historical account.
But there is also a second version of events (inconceiv
able before the end of the nineteenth century) according to
which Mendel exists because it can be shown that his ex
periments, his calculations, and his conclusions were
known and understood. But what exactly was his histori
cal responsibility? In attempting to gauge the role and in
fluence of an individual's work on the history of science,
the historian has a limited range of options. Mendel fits
none of the usual categories. He was not a precursor, for
surely a precursor is someone who, though in advance of
his contemporaries, proceeds partway along a path that
will later be followed to its end by others. But Mendel him
self followed the trail all the way to the end. He was not a
founder, for surely a founder cannot be someone unknown
to those who erect an edifice upon the foundations he laid.
For want of a pertinent category, perhaps we must settle
for a simile: Mendel's scientific work was like a premature
infant, which died because the world was not ready to re
ceive it.
Because Mendel was a historical pleonasm, at once
embarrassing and beside the point, there is a great temp
tation to ask whether his work, if it had been recognized,
would have hastened progress in biological research. On
what grounds would we deny anyone the right to succumb
\'ii
to such temptation? o historian, no matter �hat his
school, would deprive himself of the right to understand
what actually happened by trying to imagine what might
have been. The counterfactual hypothesis is . not intended
to deprive the past of its reality. On the contrary, it high
lights its true nature and clarifies the responsibility of in
dividuals, whether scientists or politicians; it purifies.

ll 3 history by demonstrating that the historical record was in
no sense dictated by Fate.
III
Our present knowledge of the structure and functions of

living matter stems from a systematic combination of re
sults from several biological disciplines (such as cytology,
microbiology, and biochemistry) with those of formal ge
netics. But this conjunction of diverse results proved fruit
ful only to the extent that it required a restructuring of the
relations among the disciplines that produced them. This
was possible because of the rapidity with which science
absorbed the lessons of information theory and cybernet
ics. Furthermore, without technologies th at would have
been inconceivable fifty years ago, such as x-ray diffraction
crystallography, electron microscopy, and radioisotope
tracing, it would have been impossible to carry out the
work that ultimately enabled researchers to show that the
conservative and innovative functions of heredity are em
bodied in the macromolecules of desoxyribonucleic acid
(DNA).
Let us cast a backward glance over the history that
made this research possibk, at the technological conditions
without which it could not have been carried out. It was in
l 944 that Avery, Macleod, and Maccarthy showed that
pure DNA could transmit hereditary characteristics from

one bacterium to another. The substance whose function
was thus finally identified had been known since 1 869.
Miescher, who first isolated it, had called it nuclein to dis
tinguish it from another class of compounds that Mulder
had named proteins. Approximately forty years later, Kas
sel analyzed the four nitrogen-containing bases found in
nucleic acid. In 1930, when it was confirmed that DNA
THE LIFE SCIENCES

r r4 and RNA were characteristically found in the chromo
somes and cytoplasm, respectively, it had lopg been forgot
ten that Walter Flemming named the nuclear formations \.
that he observed in 1 8 80 chromosomes as a tribute to the
importance of staining techniques in cytology. Without
aniline-based synthetic dyes, there would have been no ob
ject to name because of its affinity for a particular stain.
And as it happens, mauve aniline dye was William Perkin
Sr.'s consolation prize for a failed r 8 5 6 experiment.
Perkin, 1 85 6: three years before Darwin, 1 8 59.
Miescher, 1 869 : four years after Mendel, 1 865 . But Men
del might as well not have existed. Imagine for a moment
that his work had been known, accepted, and understood.
Would knowledge of the laws of heredity have made it pos
sible to link Darwin's theory of variations with the study
of the chemistry of the cell nucleus in a single research
project? Surely not. Such a project would have had no ob
ject, by which I mean no focus of research. Once again
history shows that the object of science was not something
that scientists encountered ready-made in nature but the
product of their theoretical and experimental labors.
Darwinian biology, beginning with Darwin himself,
was concerned with species of multicellular organisms,
both animals and plants. Cytologists worked on cells,
which they were inclined to view as entities in a hierar
hy, which together formed what Virchow, Bernard, and
Haeckel called a cellular state, society, or republic-an im
age that for them was apparently more than a mere meta
phor. Later, in the l 88os, Strasburger and van Beneden
confirmed August Weismann's idea that "the essence of he
redity is the transmission of a nuclear substance of a spe
cific molecular structure" by observing the eggs of sexually
reproductive Metazoa, phanerogamous plants, and para
sitic nematodes. How can we fail to be astonished today
by Weismann's assertion that "the processes of selection in _
the strict sense . . . are not possible in species that repro-

rr5 duce asexually" and that, if acquired characters are herit
able at all, they can be so only in unicellular organisms that
reproduce by fission, dividing between the offspring the
modifications inscribed in the original individual? Scienc�
was still a long way from the selective and systematic use
of bacteria for the study of macromolecufar structure,
hereditary replication, mutation, and selectidI1 in a pop
ulation of individuals. Unicellular species \yere barely
considered to be organisms.
Some twenty years earlier, however, Pasteur had intro
duced chemical methods into the study of uniC,.ellular or
ganisms that did not receive the name microbes �ntil 1 8 7 8
(Sedillot). The work of Robert Koch stimulated research in
bacteriology around the world. But germs-also known as
bacteria, bacilli, and microbes-were studiBd as agents of
organic decay and infection, as causes of problems in the
manufacture of wine and beer, and as sources of disease in
silk worms, chickens, sheep, and men, and for that reason
perhaps were considered unsuitable for use in the experi
mental study of the laws that make living things different
from crystals-in particular, the laws of reproduction.
What hope was there of discovering the laws of life in that
which threatened life, destroyed it, and lived upon it as a
parasite? Because microbes were stamped with a negative
value by men in general and even by biologists, their posi
tive value as objects of theoretical research was not yet rec
ognized. If this assertion is correct, the success of medical
microbiology delayed the inception of a biochemistry of
microbes. Be that as it may, by the end of the nineteenth
century microbiology had contributed nothing to Darwin
ism other than a new realm in which to observe the effects
of the struggle for survival. In laboratory cultures unicel
lular organisms struggled for food and oxygen-in other
words, for life. Accordingly, at the celebration in honor of
the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Origin of
Species, held at Cambridge Uniyersity in 1909, Elie Metch-
THE LIFE SCIENCES

rr6 nikoff, representing the Institut Pasteur, delivered a paper
in which he expressed pleasure at the mutual benefits that
microbiology and the theory of natural selection had de
rived from their enduring relationship.
Clearly, then, even if Mendel's papers had been widely
read and understood, they probably would not have has
tened the kind of convergence and cooperation in the life
sciences that has now, in the mid-twentieth century, yielded
knowledge, coherent and systematic if not yet totally uni
fied, of the various properties of living systems: structural
invariance, functional constancy, programmed adapta
tion of individuals, and change in the adaptive program
through the influence of the environment on the gene pool,
or, in other words, through genetic homeostasis. Indeed,
given the _nineteenth cergury's passionate intei:�.�Un Dru:
·
_
I , / winism,_�hi�b is to say, i� the tl��ory of �v�lution, Men

l '· , : ·1·i( ''?l\ c!,�£t.h�9£Y
. �.·-·' ·
. . . ()f _h�[�4i.tr w��lJ -P��bab1-}r: . h�;e been.
""
'l t
\•'•(
, \'i
I
dismis_&.ed as .a . peculiar and backward form_._q.f fiX,ism. It
w�s the neo-Mendelians, who first redid Mendel's work
and then rediscovered it, who prepared the way for the
confirmation of Darwin.
From James Watson's account of the discovery of
DNA's structure by himself and Francis Crick we learn
that the scientists who deciphered the genetic code in I 9 5 3
jested that it was "the most celebrated event in biology
since Darwin's book.'.'_ Leave it to history to judge, if it has
not already done so. In { �
any event, comparison of the ob- .
jects, instruments, and methods of researc� in the time of
Darwin with those in the time of Watson and Crick makes
it abundantly dear that the history of science is truly a
history, that is, a se�! ��·- �__t ��tures and innovations I .
"' .:::.
)
€_
would use the word utatt �?: �)f I were not averse to pat
terning the history of the-life sciences after the history of
life itself, and I would use the phrase{ii/E - Tl� /��7.� �if I
were not afraid of being suspected of intelle·auaf oppor
.
tunism. In any case, the metaphor or model is of no im-
----.....--·· ·-� -.-·� -..

I I7 gor�!.!��.:_.!h.�. itp.,p��L thing ...i_Lm_.§b.-9_�--�.2.�. yy_h_g_ did
-- �,!.J?.H!JJgw..s1.nd
w�_ ..:w.hy.the..w:oxk.�was done.
I !\
In my view, progress came when biology created for
. . 1 itself a "new scientific object," what I might call a "poly
/.r..·-
_.
,.,/[-"':.{ \,/1 scientific" or "interscientific" object, by which I mean not

"; /y\ an object treated by more than one discipline but one con-
·1, /1 / \ structed as the explicit result of collaboration among sev-
v
. .I
r . . i·mes.
eral \Ju1sc1p
In 1 8 5 9 the investigation of organic structure was
scattered and disorganized. This patchwork of research
I was a legacy of the eighteenth century. Its techniques were
I
\ ! improvised, often by one person. Theories were few and
\ brief. Scientists-whether they worked, like Darwin, in the
� field or, like histologists, embyrologists, and physiologists,
in laboratories whose equipment by modern standards was
still rather primitive-may have been vaguely aware of
what was going on in other parts of the world or even
�
down the hall in their own institutions ut their research
techniques were largely independent. (.fu his notebooks
Claude Bernard wrote that "an excess of microscopy is
harmful to physiology . . . microscopy shrinks the mind,"
and also that "the notion of quantity, so important in
mathematics, is much less important in biology." The latter
words were explicitly aimed at contemporary German
physiologists, primarily Ludwig, who no doubt had a
keener sense of the need for cooperation among different
disciplines and for eclecticism in technique. But in the fa
mous Leipzig Institute the disciplines coexisted more than
, they cooperated ]
Now consider a crystal of DNA today. It exists not as
an artifact but as a "superreal," nonnatural object, the
product of considerable technical and theoretical labor. It
is the latest in a long series of new scientific objects in
vented since the end of the nineteenth century: the cellular
extract, the intermediate metabolite, the Drosophila gene,
the culture of mutant bacteria, and so on. This new biolog-
THE LIFE SCIENCES

II8 ical object represents the intersection of a wide range of
techniques: of microextraction and microdissection, of
combinatorial algebra, of statistics, of electron microscopy,
of enzyme chemistry. The correlate of this new biological
object is a new biology, a biology born of the work that
gave rise to its object. Thus the creation of a new science
by attaching the prefix "bio-" to the word physics or chem
istry indicates more than a new domain of research; it in.:
dicates conversion to a new view of the world. Biophysi<:;s
and biochemistry are physics and chemistry of a new order.
-
In studying the processes from which the cell derives- lts
energy, for instance, biochemistry drew on results from or
dinary chemistry in the areas of low-temperature reactions
and quasi-equilibrium reactions. The new biology is the
science of an object whose structural and functional
subtlety could not have been imagined at the end of the
nineteenth century, an object obtained by a series of renun
ciations of traits previously held to be characteristic of liv
ing things, such as sexual reproduction and enzymatic
reactions. Life is now studied as far as possible as th�?gh
it were nonlife, as devoid as possible of its tradition�!
attributes.
That is why one of the major problems of 1 859, the
origin of life, can today be linked to the problem of struc
ture and studied by the same means. Today one uses exper
imental methods to investigate questions of natural history.
In the final lines of the Origin of Species Darwin evoked
the "grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,
having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few
forms or into one." 1 The reference to the "Creator" was
essentially nothing more than recognition of the limits of
the explanatory powers of the law of evolution. Where
there is life, evolution is possible. And where evolution
takes place, there is life. The question of the origin of the
first life forms was one on which Pasteur and Pouchet were
divided. Although no one believed any longer in the spon-

r r9 taneous generation of rats or flies, some believed in
spontaneous generation of infusoria. Discovery of the
maqo" . molecular structure qf living matter m;____
-- ·-· - .
..
. &TtiiQ"
. .. ·-·· __________,
�ibJ�
to combine the questions of organic evolution a_n d chemi-
��1 -�vol�ti��. At p-redsely ihe poi�t �h�re--ti��-�tudy of ele
�entacy · f� ssil forms proved to be of no avail, there being
no paleontology of macromolecules, biophysics and bio
chemistry came to the rescue. The laboratory notebook
took up where natural history left off. The chemist could,
by synthetic means, attempt to imitate the emergence of
inframicroscopic morphology and, given the total absence
of empirical data, to reconstitute rationally the way in
which the initial diversity of the chemical elements could
have evolved into a relatively unified biochemistry capable
of sustaining the selective process whereby living things
gradually became more and more complex ould Darwin tt
ian selection be shown to apply to the prebiological as well
as to the biological world? Was evolution the same before
and after the constitution of the genetic code? How did
evolution proceed from a chaos of chemical reactions
to a metabolism ordered by self-preservation and self
reproduction? Did Oparin's "protobionts"and Pirie's
"eobionts" adapt for surviva.� via the same mechanisms
0
that govern current life form A hundre� ye�� late_r, D�
win's and Pasteur's approaclies to the origins of life hay_e_
lie��- complem��t�ry. . asp�C,ts" . c;r··� .. -�i.�sk � ch
progr�rii. *.
·· · ·· · ------·- --
�· · -·-in:·· seeking laboratory solutions to problems somehow

resolved in the universe billions of years ago, contempo
rary science has posed a problem that I think can safely be
called philosophical. The attempt to reconstruct the his-
* [Canguilhem remarks here, "As. I hardly need add, the Interna

tional Colloquium on the Origins of Life, held in Moscow in
1 9 5 7, did much to encourage interdisciplinary research on these
problems." -Trans.]
THE LIFE SCIENCES

1 20 tory of life on earth is aimed at discovering hypothetical
initial conditions that could, under known laws, have re
sulted in the observed structure of existing organisms.
Even if science succeeds in answering this question, how
ever, another question needs to be asked: Were the meta
bolic processes selected by evolution and incorporated into
existing organisms the only ones that ever existed, or did
others exist in early or intermediate life forms that have
since vanished? Research into the origins of life explores a
range of possibilities limited in advance by the constraints
of present reality. Will we ever know whether the forces of
nature, working blindly, could have produced a life differ
ent from life as we know it?
At this level of inquiry certain problems arise that
have been dismissed, perhaps too easily, by many geneti
cists and biochemists. The number of possible combina
tions of a finite number of genes, each subject to mutation,
is immeasurably greater than the number of life forms ac
tually realized. Lucretius's vision of arbitrary combinations
of parts of organisms, compatible or not, does not describe
what happens in evolution. Natural selection operates only
on viable life forms, not on forms that are mere algebraic
possibilities. By viable I mean any life form capable of en
tering into a relationship with an environment for some
period of time. The genetic code preserves information re
tained after the elimination of errors. But those errors were
not errors in combination; they were only proved to be
errors when put to the test, combinations that failed to
survive. In these trials organisms interacted with their en
vironments. Mutations of genotypes, even those that turn
out to be irrelevant, are not simply deviations from some
internal rule but responses, reactions to the influence of the
environment.
Thus one can (and it is up to biologists sp�cializing in
problems of ecology to say if one should) pursue as_ a dis- _
tinct line of research questions of the effect of the environ-

121 ment upon the organism. Some biochemists would argue
no. Now, we know that in the nineteenth century such re
search led to many misunderstandings and that in the
twentieth century it has aroused bitter controversy. Leav
ing aside questions of ideological exploitation, it is the
meaning of adaptation that is at issue. Virtually no one
today believes in teleology, but many still think that chance
alone fails to provide fully satisfactory answers. If the an
swer is neither teleology nor chance, then what is left but
the opportunism of the living organism?
In other words, research into the laws that govern the
way in which the organism controls its equilibrium with
the natural environment has by no means been rendered
irrelevant by the many valuable recent discoveries in bio
chemistry and genetics. Physiologists continue to do im
portant work, as Pavlov has shown with his work on
conditioning and others with work on nervous and hor
monal functions. Indeed, the more we learn about the
mechanisms of cellular speciation, the more urgently we
need to know how the cellular division of labor is coordi
nated by complementary feedback mechanisms. In this
area, mathematical models from the theory of servome
chanisms have been used successfully in the study of recep
tors, regulators, and feedback loops. Even if the
servomechanisms in question are ultimately governed by
programs inscribed in the genes, it remains legitimate for
physiologists to study them in their own right.
Behavior is another legitimate area of study. Whatever
the role of the innate genetic program, observation and ex
perimentation remain indispensable; a special ingenuity is
required. Each of us speaks his or her mother tongue, but
the language itself, while it may contain collectively cre
ated stereotypes, does not contain the particular utterances
we need in specific and unforeseeable circumstances. The
behavior of tree-dwelling animals differs from that of cave
dwelling animals, and it is impossible fo train a member of
THE LIFE SCIENCES

1 22 one group to behave like a member of the other. Yet an ape
can learn to distinguish different geometrical shapes; in
other words, it can recognize nonnatural objects, objects
that do not exist in in a world in which there are no human
beings.
IV
From Darwin, or, more precisely, from I 900 to the present,

the life sciences have learned that most of the problems
they studied in the nineteenth century could be solved only
by changing the scale of the object of investigation and by
adopting a new methodology. In I 8 5 4 Auguste Laurent,
looking back on chemistry's new methods and accomplish
ments, felt justified in saying that chemistry had become
the science of compounds that do not exist. And in 1 8 60
Marcellin Berthelot said that chemistry creates its own ob
jects. It would take another century before biologists, with
out boasting, could make a similar claim.
This revolution in the methods and objects of the bio
logical sciences would n?t have been possible without the
physical sciences leading �he way. Because physicists and
__
chemists had "demateriali_�ed" matter, biologists were able

to explain life by "devital!�ing" it. What man since time
immemorial had sought to perceive in and about orga
nisms as they existed in nature, scientists now studied
under laboratory conditions. Darwinism, which began as
a_ gescriptive science, became a deductive Q:t;ie. Pliysiolo
gi§._�, once vivisectionists, became mathematicians. \vhat
could not be seen with the eye or grasped with th�· hand
was revealed by new technologies. Biology now depends
on technology and even computers. Knowledge of life re
lies on modern automata, which serve as its models, its
instruments, its surrogates. We must learn to work with
these simulators of human functions, and to live with ·

123 them, if we hope to understand more fully what life is.
N!!yer has it been mor�. .a.p_parent how hard man must work
to make familiar objects strange in order to make his most
vital questions worthy of science, and thus to answer them.
Note
I
From p. 505 of the edition published in 1906 in New York by
Burt.
THE LIFE SCIENCES

6 The Question of Normality in the History of
Biological Thought
The historian Emil Radl was surprised to discover that

biologists and historians counted Galileo and Descartes
among those to whom modern life science was indebted
for its methods, when "neither of them was associated
with any biological idea worth mentioning." 1 The Prague
historian was clearly already critical of what later came to
be known as reductionism, the first axioms of which were
stated by the Vienna School. Radl was explicitly dissociat
ing himself from a certain post-Darwinian philosophy of
biology, in which positivist taboos and materialist injunc
tions were amalgamated into a laboratory rationalism and
identified with the political radicalism of the period. If life
is nothing but matter, so much for the soul, immortality,
and the power of the priests !
But what is a "biological idea?" Or, to put it another
way, what is an "idea of the biological ? " Can history pro
vide an answer to such a question? And must one have an
answer before one can consider the history of biology to
be part of the history of science?
The history of a science would surely fail of its goal if
it did not succeed in representing the succession of at
tempts, impasses, and repetitions that resulted in the con
stitution of what the science today takes to be its object of
1 26 interest. Unlike geometry and astronomy, terms that are
more than two thousand years old, the term biology is not
yet two hundred years old. When it was first proposed,
geometry had long since ceased to the science of figures
that can be drawn with straightedge and compass, while
astronomy had only recently expanded its scope of interest
beyond the solar system. In both cases, the signifier of the
scientific discipline remained the same, but the discipline in
question had broken with its past. By contrast, the concept
of biology was invented to characterize, in retrospect, a
discipline that had not yet broken with its past.
The word biology occurs for the first time in La
marck's Hydrogeology (1 802). When he mentioned the
word again, in the preface to his Zoological Philosophy
( 1 809), it was in allusion to a treatise to be entitled Biology
that he never actually wrote. Strikingly, this preface is con
cerned with general problems of animal organization "as
one traverses their entire series from the most perfect to
the most imperfect." The idea of a hierarchical series of
animals, a "chain of being," indicates that the object of the
new biology was the same as that of Aristotle's Historia
animalium and De partibus animalium. Hence Lamarck's
own invention-modification in the organs through force
of habit and under the influence of changing environmen
tal conditions-was explicitly intended to reestablish "the
very order of nature" beyond the lacunae and discontinui
ties in the system of classification proposed by naturalists,
that is, to establish a clear progression and gradation i�
organization that could not be overlooked despite any
" anomalies."
As for the other inventor of the term and concept of
biology, G. R. Treviranus, the very title of the book he pub
lished in I 8 0 2, Biologie oder Philosophie .der Lebenden
Natur fur Naturforscher und Arzte (volume 2 in a six
volume series, the· last of which was publis�ed in 1 822),

I 27 indicates that he had no wish to separate or distinguish the
n�turalist from the physician as to their philosophical or
general conception of the phenomena of life. Thus, at the
turn of the nineteenth century, a new way of looking at the
study of living things, which entailed a new .logic, was in
fact limited by the traditional association of the standpoint
of the naturalist with that of the physician, that of the in
vestigator with that of the healer. Cuvier in his History of
the Natural Sci(!nces (sixth lecture) emphasized Aristotle's
debt as naturalist to Asdepiades. In the same spirit Charles
Singer has written that since Hippocrates was anointed the
"father of medicine," he might also be called the "father of
biology."
Since the turn of the nineteenth century, however, def
initions of biology's specific object have . been purged of
value-laden concepts such as perfection or imperfection,
normality or abnormality. Therapeutic intentions, which
once informed or, more accurately, deformed, the biolo
gist's view of laboratory work, have since been limited to
the applications of biological knowledge. Hence it would
seem that the question of "normality" in the history of
biology ought to be classed as a matter of historical rather
than current interest. I shall attempt to prove the contrary.
To that end, I direct the reader's attention to the end of
the historical process. For contemporary biochemists, the
functions of self-preservation, self-reproduction, and self
regulation are characteristic properties of microorganisms
such as bacteria. The model often proposed by scientists
themselves and not just by popularizers of their work is
that of the "fully automated chemical factory." 2 The or
ganic functions are acknowledged to be superior to their
technological counterparts in reliability if not infallibility
and in the existence of mechanisms for detecting and cor
recting reproductive errors or flaws. These facts make it
reasonable to ask whether there is not some principle of
NORMALITY
1 28 thematic conservation at work in the historical constitu
tion of biology. On this view, which contrasts with an idea
of science elaborated by historians and philosophers in the
era when physics dealt with macroscopic objects, biology
is different from the other sciences, and the history of biol
ogy ought to reflect that fact in the questions it asks and
the way in which it answers them. For the alleged principle
of thematic conservation in the history of biology is per
haps only a reflection of the biologist's acceptance in one
way or another of the indisputable fact that life, whatever
form it may take, involves self-preservation by means of
self-regulation. Might this be what Emil Radl meant by a
"biological idea" ? Without a doubt the road from A:cis
totle's entelechy to the biochemist's enzyme is long and
winding. But is it really a road?
The fundamental concepts in Aristotle's definition of life

are those of soul and organ. A living body is an animate
and organized body. It is animate because it is organized.
Its soul is in fact act, form, and end. "Suppose that the eye
were an animal-sight would have been its soul. . . . We
must now extend our consideration from the 'parts' to the
whole living body; for what the departmental sense is to
the bodily part which is its organ, that the whole faculty
of sense is to the whole sensitive body as such" (De anima ·
Il. 1 4 1 2b 1 8, J. A. Smith, translator). The organs are the
instruments of the soul's ends. "The body too must some
how or other be made for the soul, and each part of it for
some subordinate function, to which it is adapted" (De
partibus animalium I.5 645b18, William Ogle, translator).
It is impossible to overstate the influence of Aristotle's use
of the term organon to designate a functional part (mo-:

129 rion) of an animal or vegetal body such as a hand, beak,
wing, root, or what have you. Until at least the end of the
eighteenth century anatomy and physiology preserved,
with all its ambiguities, a term that Aristotle borrowed
from the lexicon of artisans and musicians, whose use in
dicates implicit or explicit acceptance of some sort of anal
ogy between nature and art, life and technics.
� s is well known, Aristotle conceived of nature and
life as the art of arts, by which he meant a process teleo
logical by its very nature, immanent, unpremeditated, and
undeliberated-a process that every technique tends to im
itate and that the art of medicine approaches most closely
when it heals by applying to itself rules inspired by the idea
of health, the telos and form of the living organism. Aris
totle, a physician's son, thus subscribed tQ a biological
naturalism that had affinities with the naturalism of
Hippocrates.
Life's teleological process is not perfectly efficient and
infallible, however. The existence of monsters (De genera
tione animalium lV. 10) shows that nature does make mis
takes, which can be explained in terms of matter's
resistance to form. Forms or ends are not necessarily and
universally exemplary; a certain deviation is tolerated. The
form of an organism is expressed through a rough con
stancy; it is what the organism appears to be most of the
time. Hence we can consider a form to be a norm, com
pared to which t�e exceptional can be characterized as
abnormal.
Descartes contradicted Aristotle's propositions point
by p'oint. For him, nature was identical with the laws of
motion and conservation. Every art, including medicine,
was a kind of machine-building. Descartes preserved the
anatomical and physiological concept of an organ but
eliminated any distinction between organization and fab
rication. A living body could serve as the model for an au-
NORMALITY
1 30 tomaton or vice versa. Yet there was an ambiguity in this
reversibility. The intention behind the construction of an
automaton was to copy nature, but in the Cartesian theory
of life the automaton served as an intelligible equivalent of
nature. In Cartesian physics there is no room for an onto
logical difference between nature and art. "When a watch
indicates the time by means of the wheels of which it is
made, that is no less natural than when a particular tree or
seed produces a particular fruit" (Principes de la philoso
phie IV.203).
It is not surprising that some historians of biology and
medicine place Descartes in the same group as the Italian
mathematician-physicians inspired by Galileo's mechanics
and Santorius's medical statics. Yet other historians find
this classification paradoxical, since it makes the reduc
tionist enterprise a part of the history of biology even
though its effect was to obliterate that science's distinctive
subject matter-what I have been calling its specific object.
To my mind, this rather scholastic distinction is unwork
able, for it is based on an incomplete reading of the sources
and inadequate attention to certain concepts. Des.cartes, I
shall argue, did not succeed in winning adherents to his
project or program because he was obliged to incorporate
into his definition of life as an aspect of mechanics certain
positive attributes that resisted assimilation to that view.
To begin with, the Cartesian watch is no less subject
to the laws of mechanics if it tells the time incorrectly thai:i
if it tells the time correctly (Meditations metaphysiques
.
VI) . Similarly, it is no less natural for a man to be sick than
to be healthy, and sickness is not a corruption of nature
(ibid.). Yet the thirst that drives the victim of dropsy to
drink is a "veritable error of nature," even though it is an
effect of the substantial union of soul and body, whose sen
sations, such as thirst or pain, are statistically valid indi
cators of things or situations favorable or harmful "to the
conservation of the human body when it is fully healthy"
TRIUMPHS OF.BIOLOGICAL RATIONALITY

13 1 (ibid.). This idea is confirmed at the end of the Conversa
tions. with Burman ( 1 648), in which the medicine of the
physicians, not based on sound Cartesian mechanics, is
denigrated and ridiculed in favor of a course of conduct
amenable, as animals are, to the silent lessons of nature
concerning "self-restitution." "Every man is capable of
being his own physician." 3 Even for Descartes, self
preservation remains the primary distinctive characteristic
of the living body. After Descartes's death (1650), the
watch model was further elaborated by the addition of reg
ulator devices, long after their invention by Huygens: the
isochronous pendulum ( 1 657) and the spiral spring
( 1 675). When Lavoisier introduced the concept of "regu
lators of the animal machine" into the physiology of res
piration and animal heat (in his First Memoir on the
Respiration of Animals, 1789), Cartesian concepts were
brought into line with Hippocratic intuition.
If the metaphorical concept of the "animal machiqe"
could not totally conceal that characterlStlCfeature of life
for which the name "regulation" was suggested in the eigh
teenth century, the no less metaphorical concept of �' ani- _
mal economy," first put forward in 1 640 in imitation of the

notion of political economy (proposed in 1 6 1 5), was ex
plicitly intended to evoke the well-tempered structures and
functions of the organized body. Like the domestic econ
omy, the animal economy required wise government of a
complex entity in order to promote the general welfare. In
the history of physiology the idea of "animal economy"
was responsible for a gradual shift from the notion of ani
mal machine to the notion of organism over the course of
the eighteenth century. Now, the concept of economy, like
that of organ, can be traced back to Aristotl� . The overlap
of the two concepts is governed by some logic in the his
tory of scientific ideas.
Evidence for widespread efforts to work out a new
concept of life after 1 650 can be seen in the proliferation
NORMALITY
l32 of derivatives of the word organ in Latin, French, and En
glish: organization, organized, organic, and organism, to
name a few. These were used by both philosophers such as
Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, and Bossuet and physicians such
as Duncan and Stahl. Undoubtedly it was Stahl who most
stubbornly defended the irreducibility of the organism,
that is, the idea that a certain order obtains in the relations
of the parts of a mechanism to the whole (De diversitate
organismi et mecanismi, 1706). A living body is both in
strumented and instrumental. Its efficient structure (struc
tura, constructio, ordinatio, distributio, par. l 9) reveals
cooperation on the part of mediate or immediate agents.
The material constitution of the body is subject to rapid
corruption. Stahl observes, however, that disease is an ex
ceptional condition. Hence there must be some power of
conservation, some immaterial power offering active resist
ance to decomposition, permanently at work in the bodies
of living things. Self-preservation of the organism is
achieved as a result not of some mechanical but of natural
" autocracy" (De autocratia naturae, 1 696).
The importance of Stahlian animism is not to be
gauged by the refutation of most of Stahl's ideas as physi
ology progressed. Assuming that the identification of en
during characteristics of organisms is a less fragile element
of Stahl's system than is the attribution of ·supposed causes
of those characteristics, then Stahl left his mark on more
than one nineteenth-century biologist. He had his follow
ers in Scotland and England (such as Robert Whytt) and in
Germany (such as Felix Platner) but most of all in France,
where the Stahlian school in Montpellier, led by T. de Bor
deu and P.-J. Barthez, inspired the work of Xavier Bichat.
Claude Bernard's criticism of Bichat's vitalism did not pre
vent him from acknowledging that his approach to physi
ology owed as much to the reading of Bichat as to the
example of Magendie. Death, disease, and the �apacity for
recovery are the characteristics that distinguish life from

l 33 mere existence. ''Philosophical physicians and naturalists
have been deeply struck by the tendency of organized
beings to reestablish their form . . . and thus to demon
strate their unity, their morphological individuality" (Le
�ons sur Les phenomenes de la vie communs aux animaux
et aux vegetaux, 1st lecture, 18 7 8). The causal theories
proposed to explain the regularity and consistency of or
ganized phenomena mattered less to Bernard than recog
nition of the fact of organization itself: "Hence in the
animate body there is an arrangement, a sort of ordering,
that should not be overlooked, for it is truly the most sa
lient trait of living beings. I admit that the idea of this ar
rangment is ill expressed by the term force. But here the
word is of little importance; suffice it to say that the reality
of the fact is beyond dispute. " 4
It is not only the history of anatomy and physiology
that begins with Aristotle but also the history of what was
long called "natural history," including the classification of
living things, their orderly arrangement in a table of simi
larities and differences, study of their kinship through
morphological comparison, and, finally, study of the com
patibility of different modes of existence. Natural history
sought to explain the diversity of life forms able to coexist
in a given environment. Linnaeus (1749) referred to this
coexistence as the oeconomia naturae.
The dominant question in the history of natural his
tory was that of species. What is the status of the set of
determinants that distinguishes the wolf from the jackal,
the buttercup from the rose? Is it nominal or real? The
distinguishing features are enduring traits, yet they do ad
mit variations and differences. Hence natural historians
were obliged to investigate the conditions under which
unity can subsist within diversity, and thus they were led
to explain morphology in terms of genealogy, forms in
terms of their modes of reproduction. Accordingly, they
NORMALITY
r 34 showed keen interest in questions of fertility and interfer
tility, hybridization and intersterility.
Ig_the eighteenth century the status of specie_s -�Y�� l:!_e
foremost problem of the naturali�ts, as can be s�e1:UTIQSt
dearly ofalrin the work o(Buffon and Linnaeus. The lat
- --
t� -�ff�.T �ot experience as much difficulty as the former in
holding that the species were fixed at creation and perpet
uated from generation to generation. Buffon attempted to
resolve the problem with his theory of "internal molds"
and "organic molecules." Organic molecules, he main
tained, were indestructible; they survived the process of re
production from generation to generation, accumulating in
the bodies of living things in specific forms shaped by in
ternal molds. The latter, determined by the form of the or
ganism, dictated the way in which the parts had to be
arranged in order to form a whole.
Consider for a moment the internal mold metaphor.
Molds are used in smelting and masonry to impose a cer
tain three-dimensional shape. Etymologically the word is
related to modulus and model. In common usage it indi
cates a structural norm. In living organisms, however, the
structural norm can accommodate irregularities, to which
Buffon refers on more than one occasion as anomalies
(etres anomaux). An organic anomaly is not the same as a
physical irregularity, however. Initially Buffon conceived of
generation as analogous to crystallization, but ultimately
he came to think 6f crystallization as a form of organiza- .
tion. He was unable to avoid associating anomali�s with
degeneration, hence with the problem of the mutability of
species. On this point Buffon was never able to achieve cer
tainty. He did not regard the idea of derivative species as ·
absurd on its face, but he believed or professed to believe

that observation confirmed the teachings of the Bible (see
his article "The Ass" in the Natural History of Animals).
Maupertuis was bolder in theorizing, perhaps because
TRIUMPHS OF BIOLOGICAL RATIONALITY -

r 35 he possessed less extensive empirical information. For him,
structural variation was the rule of organic progression. In
the System of Nature (175 1) he set forth . a theory of gen
eration based on the existence of elementary particles of
matter endowed with appetite and memory, whose "ar
rangement)' reproduces the possibly miraculous structure
of the first individuals (par. xxxi). The phenomena of re
semblance, miscegenation, and monstrosity could be ex
plained, he argued, in terms of the compatibility or
incompatibility of "arrangements" in seeds mingled
through copulation. "Can we not explain in this way how
from just two individuals the most dissimilar species could
have multiplied? Originally they may have stemmed from
fortuitous productions in which the elementary parts did
not retain the order they occupied in the father and mother
animals. Each degree of error could have produced a new
species, and repeated errors could have given rise to the
infinite diversity of animals that we see today" (par. xiv).
It is tempting to read this text with spectacles pro
vided by contemporary biochemical and genetic theory.
Order and error occur both here and in contemporary ac
counts of he,reditary biochemical defects as ground and
cause of both normality and abnormality. But today bio
chemistry and genetics offer us a way of interpreting or
ganic abnormalities that was worked out in cooperation
with the Darwinian explanation of the origin of species
and the adaptation of organisms. Hence Maupertuis's
propositions should be regarded more as fictions than as
anticipations of scientific theories to come. He was unable
to overcome the difficulty posed by the natural mechanism
for normalizing differences. Both he and Buffon believed
that human intervention-through techniques of hus
bandry or agronomy-was the only way to stabilize vari
ations within species: "What is certain is that any variety
that might indicate a new species of animal or plant ten�s
NORMALITY
136 to die out. There are some deviations in which Nature per
sists only through art or government. Her own works al
ways tend to regain the upper hand" ( Venus physiqueJ
1 74 5 , part 2, chapter 5 , conclusion) . It was left to Darwin
to discover variation, that is, a natural mechanism for nor
malizing minor anomalies.
The publication of On the Origin of Species by Means
of Natural Selection; or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life ( l 8 5 9) occasioned doubts in
the minds of some early readers because of the traditional
meaning of certain concepts mentioned in the title and fre
quently alluded to in the body of the work. The theory of
natural selection states that certain deviations from the
norm can be seen a posteriori to provide a tenuous advan
tage for survival in novel ecological situations. Darwin
thus substituted a random fit for a preordained adaptation.
Natural selection is eliminative. Disadvantaged organisms
die; the survivors are all different in one degree or another.
The reader who takes literally such Darwinian terms as
selection, advantage, adaptation, favor, and disfavor may
partially overlook the fact that teleology has been excluded
from Darwin's theory. Does this mean that all value-laden
terms have been excluded from the idea of life? Life and
death, success or failure in the struggle for survival-are
these value-neutral concepts, even if success is reduced to
nothing more than continued existence? Does Darwin's
language reveal his thought or does it suggest that even for
Darwin a causal explanation of adaptation could not abol
ish the "vital meaning" of adaptation, a meaning deter
mined by comparison of the living with the dead? As
Darwin observed, variations in nature would have re
mained without effect, had it not been for natural selec
tion. What could limit the ability of this law; operating
over a long period of time and rigorously scrutinizing the
structure, overall organization, and habits of every crea-

I37 ture, to promote good and reject evil? (See Origin of Spe
cies, chapter 14, "Recapitulation," etc.)
And Darwin's work ends with a contrast, "that while
this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law
of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most
beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being
evolved."
In suggesting that individual variations, deviations in
structure or instinct, are useful because they yield a sur
vival advantage in a world in which relations of organism
to organism are the most important of all causes of change
in living beings, Darwin introduced a new criterion of nor
mality into biology, a criterion based on the living crea
ture's relation to life and death. By no means did he
eliminate morality from consideration in determining the
object of biology. Before Darwin, death was considered to
be the regulator of the quantity of life (Buffon) or the sanc
tion imposed for infractions of Nature's order, the instru
ment of her equilibrium (Linnaeus). According to Darwin,
death is a blind sculptor of living forms, forms elaborated
without preconceived idea, as deviations from normality
are converted into chances for survival in a changed envi
ronment. Darwin purged from the concept of adaptation
any reference to a preordained purpose, but he did not
separate it completely from the concept of normality. In the
spirit of Darwinism, however, a norm is not a fixed rule
but a transitive capacity. The normality of a living thing is
that quality of its relation to the environment that enables
it to generate descendants exhibiting a range of variations
and standing in a new relation to their respective environ
ments, and so on. Normality is not a quality of the living
thing itself but an aspect of the all-encompassing relation
between life and death as it affects the individual life form
at a given point in time.
Thus the environment decides, in a nonteleological
NORMALITY
l 38 way, which variations will survive, but this does not nec
essarily mean that evolution does not tend to create an or
ganic order, firm in its orientation if precarious in its
incarnations. Heredity is an uninterrupted delegation of
ordinal power. What difference does it make if, in Salva
dor Luria's words, "evolution operates with threats, not
promises." 5
II
To sum up, in the l 86os both naturalists and physiologists

looked upon the organism in two different ways, in terms
of either normality or anomaly. But there was far from
universal agreement as to the grounds for these divergent
evaluations.
Because Darwinism refuted the claims of natural or
revealed theology concerning the origin of species, some
biologists and philosophers felt that it should also bear the
burden of refuting any nonmechanist, nonmaterialist con
cept of life. In this they were encouraged by progress in the
analysis and synthesis of organic compounds and in the
reduction of vital processes to chemical transformations
and exchanges of energy according to the emerging laws of
thermodynamics.
The physiologists took their inspiration from a dis
tinction first made by Bichat (General Anatomy Applied to
Physiology and Medicine, 1 801, vol. 1, pp. 20-21):
There are two kinds of life phenomena: (1) the state of
health, and (2) the state of sickness. Hence there are two
distinct sciences: physiology, which is concerned with phe- .
nomena of the first state, and pathology, which is con
cerned with those of the second. The history of phenomena
in which the vital forces have their natural type leads us to
that of phenomena in which those forces are distorted.
Now, in the physical sciences, only the first history exists;
the second is nowhere to be found. Physiology is to the

I 39 motion of living bodies what astronomy, dynamics, hy
dr.aulics, hydrostatics, and so forth . . . are to the motions
of inert bodies. The latter have no science that corresponds
to them as pathology corresponds to the former.
But not all physiologists agreed with Bichat that there exist
vital forces not subject to the laws of physics. Here I must
ci�e Claude Bernard once more, because his position is so
up-to-date. He admitted, first of all, that vital phenomena
are subject only to physical and chemical causes, but he
also held that the organism develops from the egg accord
ing to an immanent design, a plan, a regularity, which is
responsible for its ultimate organization� for its harmony,
persistence, and, if need be, restoration.
What Claude Bernard described in images is today ex
plained by the theorems of macromolecular biochemistry.
Like the metaphor of the "internal mold," the images of
"design," "plan," "guiding idea," and "order" are given
retroactive legitimacy by t4e concept of a program en
coded in sequences of nucleotides.6 For the first time in the
history of biology, all the properties of living things
growth, organization, reproduction, hereditary conti
nuity-can be explained in terms of molecular structure,
chemical reactions, enzymes, and genes.
Yet twentieth-century biochemistry has reached a con
clusion opposite to that toward which most nineteenth
century organic chemists were tending: the abolition of all
differences between living and nonliving things. Today we
recognize that living things exist in a state of unstable dy
namic equilibrium, their orderly structure-whether of
disorderly molecules or orderly crystals-maintained by
means of a constant borrowing of energy from the environ
ment. Thus, paradoxically, it was not simply because biol
ogy submitted its objects to the unfettered jurisdiction of
physicists and chemists that the unique nature of those ob
jects was established on a firm rational basis. The concepts
of regulation and homeostasis were also required to make
NORMALITY
140 sense of the biological functions of resisting and delaying
aging, disintegration, and disorder, relatively autonomous
functions of open, hence environmentally dependent, liv
ing systems. Thus the intent behind all the intuitions, im
ages, and metaphors of organic normality proved to be
justified even as their content was shown to be of little
value.
The level of objectivity at which the opposition be
tween normal and abnormal was legitimate was shifted
from the surface to the depths, from the developed orga
nism to its germ, from the macroscopic to the ultramicro
scopic. Now it is the transmission of the hereditary
message, the production of the genetic program, that de
termines what is normal and what is a deviation from the
normal. Some human chromosomal anomalies such as
mongolism can be observed directly in the clinic. Others,
such as Klinefelter's syndrome, are tolerated without ap
parent ill effect and manifest themselves only in special
ecological circumstances. As for genetic anomalies, I shall
mention only "innate errors of metabolism" (Garrod,
1909), that is, specific biochemical lesions that result from
the presence of a mutant gene, which is called abnormal
not so much because of its statistical rarity as because of
its pathological or even fatal effects (hemophilia, Hunting
ton's chorea, etc.). A new nomenclature of disease is thus
established, referring disease not to the individual consid
ered in its totality but to its morphological and functional
constitutents: diseases of the hemoglobin, hormonal dis
eases (such as hyperthyroidism), muscle diseases, and so
on. Gene mutations that block chemical syntheses by alter
ing their enzyme catalysts are no longer interpreted as de
viations in Maupertuis's sense but as errors in reading the
genetic "message," errors in the reproduction or , copying
of a text.
The term error does not imply that science has re
turned to the Aristotelian and medieval notion that mon-

r4 r stets ar� errors of nature, for the failure here is not some
lack of skill on the part of the artisan or architect but a
mere copyist's slip. Still, the new science of living things
has not only not eliminated the contrast between normal
and abnormal; it has actually grounded that contrast in the
·
structure of living things themselves.7
III
A remarkable and interesting fact from the epistemological

standpoint is the proliferation of terms containing the pre
fix auto-, used today by biologists to describe the functions
and behavior of organized systems: auto-organization,
auto-reproduction, auto-regulation, auto-immunization,
and so on. No doubt biophysicists and biochemists have
been searching for terms to express the mechanisms under
lying these properties and to construct cybernetic models
of self-reproductive automata (J. von Neumann). These
models are only logical, however, and the only actual self
reproductive automata are natural organic systems, that is,
living organisms. The epistemological reason for preceding
these terms with the prefix auto- is to convey something
about the nature of their relation to the environment. Ac
cording to Schrodinger, "Life is a behavior of matter . . .
based upon the maintenance of a preexisting order" (What
Is Life?, 1945 ) ; and according to A. Lwoff, "The biological
order has. no source other than the biological order"
(L'Ordre biologique, 1962). Living systems are open, non
equilibrium systems that maintain their organization both
because they are open to the external world and in spite of
being open to the external world. 8 Organization by what
ever name one wishes to call it-negentropy, information,
systemic improbability-expresses the quality of a certain
physical quantity. That alone suffices to distinguish biology
from physics, even though the former now seems to have
NORMALITY
142 linked its destiny to the latter. The biologist cannot help
continuing to use the concept of normality. Suppose, for
example, that one base in the genetic sequence is substi
tuted for another. Lwoff points out that "for the physicist,
even if the mutation is lethal, nothing has changed. The
quantity of negative entropy has not varied. But since the
mutation is lethal, the transformed organism cannot func
tion normally or reproduce itself. It has ceased to live"
(ibid.). Or think of Leon Brillouin's related example of a
skillful surgeon who is able to separate the organs of an
animal, keep them alive, and then reassemble them to cre
ate either a viable being or a monstrous creature that can
not sustain life: "The two reconstructions are equally
improbable, but the value of the first is higher than that of
the second. Should the definition of total negentropy be
associated with improbability or value? Shall we consider
a monster the equivalent of a 'well-balanced' being? Only
the notion of value seems to fit this new problem, but how
are we to define it properly? " *
Perhaps the epistemologist may now be allowed to remain

skeptical about dogmatic reductionist views, given what
can be learned if we look at the history of biology without
any simplifying a priori assumptions and in light of the·
various manifestations of what I have proposed calling the
principle of thematic conservation.
I anticipate one possible objection, however. In look..'.'
ing for a distiJ?-ctive concept of normality in biology, have I
not confused the issue by considering different orders of
biological objects? Astronomers from Herschel to Hubble
* [Source: Vie, matiere, et observation (Paris: Albin Michel,

1959), p. rn 5 .-Trans.]
I •

143 revolutionized their discipline by magnifying their object
to an unimaginable degree, revealing galaxies beyond the
solar system and metagalaxies beyond the galaxies. By
contrast, biologists have discovered the nature of life by
making their objects smaller and smaller: bac�erium, gene,
enzyme. In the preceding discussion, am I dealing with ob
servations at one level and explanations at another? Nor
mality appears to be a property of the organism, but it
disappears when we look at the elements that make up that
organism.
At all levels, however, biologists have identified order
ing structures that while generally reliable sometimes fail.
The concept of normality is intended to refer to these or
dering structures. No such concept is needed in the episte
mology of physics. By introducing it as I have done here I
in no way intend to deny that biology is based on physics
and chemistry. I do intend to prevent the coalescing of two
properly distinct approaches to history. In the history of
biology the psuedotheoretical content of prescientific con
ceptualizations of structural and functional normality was
abandoned, but the conceptualizations themselves have
been preserved, in "displaced" form, as indices of the ob
jective uniqueness of the living organism. Mendeleev's pe
riodic table does not justify Democritus's intuitions a
posteriori, but the decoding of the genetic program does
provide a posteriori justification of Claude Bernard's met
aphors. Even within the terms of a monist, indeed a mate
rialist, epistemology, physics remains radically different
from biology. Physics was produced, sometimes at risk of
life and limb, by living things subjeet to sickness and death,
but sickness and death are not problems of physics. They
are problems of biology.
Between the bacteria in a laboratory culture and the
biologists who observe them there is a whole range of liv
ing things permitted to exist by the filter of natural selec
tion. Their lives are governed by certain norms of behavior
NORMALITY
144 and adaptation. Questions about the vital meaning of
those norms, though not directly matters of chemistry and
physics, are questions of biology. As Marjorie Greene
points out, alongside the biochemists there is room in biol
ogy for a Buytendijk or a Kurt Goldstein.9 History shows
that she is right.
My purpose in this essay was in part to show how
philosophy can influence the statement of a historical
problem, in this case a question in the history of biology. It
may be that I failed to achieve this goal. But I also wanted
to challenge the view that there is no point in asking such
questions, which only complicate matters needlessly. For I
maintain that the proper function of philosophy is pre
cisely to complicate matters, not only for the historian of
science but for man in general.
Notes
l
Geschichte der biologischen Theorien in der Neuzeit, vol. l, part
2, revised edition (Leipzig and Berlin, 1 9 1 3 ), preface, p. viii:
"Auch von den Biologen wurde ein Galilei, ein Descartes als Be
griinder der neuen Auffassung des Lebens gepriesen, obwohl an
diselben keine beachtenswertere biologische Idee anzukniipfen
ist."
2
Fran�ois Jacob, La Logique du vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1970),

p. 3 02.
3
Cf. E. Aziza-Shuster, Le Medecin de soi-meme (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, . . . . ), chapter r .
4
Ibid. My italics.
5
The Unfinished Experiment, 1973 ·
6 .
See my preface to the modern edition of Bernard's Ler;ons sur /es
phenomenes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux vegetaux
(Paris: Vrin, 1966) .
7
See my Le Normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses Universi- ·
taires de France, 1966) , pp. 207-21 8 .
TRIUMPHS O F BIOLOGICAL RATIONALITY

145 8
Though normally I would resist the temptation to read old texts
with today's eyes as anticipations of things to come, I cannot re
sist citing two passages from Cuvier's Histoire des progres des
sciences naturelles de I789 jusqu'a ce jour, l 810 (Nelle edition,
1 8 34) : " Life is a constant turbulence, whose direction, however
complex, remains constant, as does the species of molecules in
volved, though not the individual molecules themselves. On the
contrary, the matter that presently constitutes the living body will
soon cease to do so, yet it is the repository of the force that will
constrain the future matter to move in the same direction. Thus
the form of these bodies is more essential to them than their mat
ter, for the latter constantly changes, while the former is pre
served, and because it is forms that constitute the differences
between species and not combinations of matter, which are prac
tically the same in all" (p. 1 87); and further: " One misconstrues
the nature of life by thinking of it as a mere bond that holds
together the elements of the living body. On the contrary, it is a
spring that constantly moves and transports those elements" (p.
•
210).
9
Approaches to a Philosophical Biology (New York: Basic Books,
1965).
NORMALITY
Sources
The essays collected here originally appeared in the follow

ing locations:
The Role of Epistemology in Contemporary History of Science

This text was first published in Italian as "Il rnole de l' epistemo
logia nella storografia scientifica contemporanea," Scienza e
Technica 76, Annuario della Enciclopedia della Scienza e della
Technica (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), pp. 427-43 6.
What Is a Scientific Ideology?

Lecture given in October 1969 at Warsaw and Cracow to the
Institute for the History of Science and Technology and the Polish
Academy of Science. It was published in the journal Organon
7( 1970).
John Brown's System: An Exemplary Medical Ideology

This essay expands on a brief paper delivered to the Thirteenth
International Congress on the History of Science in Moscow ( 1 8-
24 August 1971) under the title "John Brown (173 5-1788). La
theorie de l'incitabilite de l'organisme et son importance histo
rique." This preliminary version was published in the proceedings
of the Congress, section 9 (Moscow, 1974).
Bacteriology and the End o f Nineteenth-Century "Medical

Theory"
Lecture given in April 197 5 at the Autonomous University of Bar
celona, Institute for the History of Medicine, directed by Prof.
Felipe Cid.
1 48 The Development of the Concept of Biological Regulation in
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Paper delivered at the College de France Colloquium in December
1974 entitled "The Idea of Regulation in Contemporary Sci
ence," organized by Messrs. Andre Lichnerowicz, Jacques Lions,
Frarn;ois Perroux, and Gilbert Gadoffre. It was previously pub
lished in L'Idee de regulation dans !es sciences (Paris: Maloine
Doin, 1977) . The text here has been expanded with further
details on conceptual advances in German physiology and addi
tional notes.
On the History of the Life Sciences since Darwin

Address delivered at the inaugural session of the Thirteenth In
ternational Congress on the History of Science (Moscow, r 8-24
August 197 1 ) . It was not included in the published congress
proceedings.
The Question of Normality in the History of Biological

Thought
This essay, whose topic was suggested to me, is a revised version
of a paper delivered to the Jywaskyla (Finland) Colloquium or
ganized in June and July of 1973 by the History and Philosophy
Divisions of the International Union for the History and Philos
ophy of Science.
SOURCES
Index
Ackerknecht, E. H., 54 Animal magnetism, 4 3

Action, as concept, 6 l Animalculists, 3 5
Adaptation Animals
concept of, 9-10 Magendie's use of, 5 9
Darwin on, 1 3 6-1 3 7 organizatio� of, 1 26
Darwin's theory of, lo4-rn5 Animism, 90, l 3 2
as new biological concept, Anisotropy, 8 l
17 Anomalies
research on, l 21 Buffon on, l 34
Adolph, E. F., rn2n genetic, 140
Alchemy, history of, 28 Antigens, 66
Alizarin, synthesis of, 67 Antiscience, 3 3
Althusser, Louis, 17 Arago, Fran�ois, 8 8
Ampere, A. M., 82 Aristotle
Analytic philosophy, l 2 biological naturalism of, l 29
Ancient medicine concept of economy and,
compared with modern, 5 2 131
Freud on, 5 3 definition of life of, 128
Andreossy (General), 89 on hierarchical series of ani
Anesthesia, 60 mals, 1 26
Anilin Konzern, 67 influence of, 1 5, 1 6
Aniline, 67, n4 on natural history, 1 3 3
Animal economy, 87-88, 1 3 ! Aromatic compounds, 67
Animal factory, 8 8 . See also Asclepiades, l 27
Animal economy Asthenia, 44
Animal galvanism, 4 3 Asthenic disease, 4 3
Animal machine, 8 8 . See also Asymmetry, 70
Animal economy Atomism, 3 3-34
clock as model for, 84 Audin-Rouviere (Dr.), 74n
regulators of, Lavoisier on, Auenbriigger, L., 54
131 Automata, 1 3 0, 1 4 1
regulators governing, 9 1 Automatism, Cartesian, 9 6
1 50 Autopsies, 7 2 on pathology/physiology,
Autoregulator, 9 8-99 75n
Avery, Oswald Theodore, I r 3 physiology of, 57
on regulateur, 8 3
Bachelard, Gaston self-characterization of, 60-
and concept of "epistemo 6I
logical break," 5 on vital forces, I 3 9
mathematical framework of, Berthelot, Marcellin, 5 2, 7 3 ,
I3 1 22
on obsolete vs. valid science, Bertrand, Gabriel, 5-6
39 Besnier, Ernest, 77n
on practicing science, 8 Bichat, Xavier, 44, 46, I 3 2
on rationalism of color, 68 on disease, 54-5 5
on scientific truth, r I on physiology/pathology,
summary of teachings of, 1 3 8....:..1 3 9
IO-I I Biochemistry, 72, I I 8
Bachelard, Suzanne, 4-5 macromolecular, I 3 9 -140
Bacteriology, 5 I-77 20th-century, I 39-I40
Badische Analin und Soda Biological rationality,
Fabrik (BASF), 67 triumphs of in 1 8th and
Baer, Karl-Ernst von, 3 6, 19th centuries, 79-145
108 Biological regulation, 8 1-102.
Balance of nature, 92 See also Regulation, concept
Banishment, 27 of
Barthez, P. ]., 1 3 2 Biology
Bateson, William, r o 5 , I I 2 concept of, 1 25-1 26
Bayle, Pierre, 8 3 , 84 Darwinian, I l4-I I9
Beddoes, Thomas, 44 as distinguished from phys
Beer, Sir Gavin de, 9 ics, 1 4 1-I42
Behavior, 1 2 1-122 first use of term, 126
Behring, E. A. von, 6 5-66 new scientific object and,
Belidor, Bernard, 8 8 I I7
Bell, Charles, 5 8 post-Darwinian philosophy
Beneden, P. J. van, I 14 of, 1 25
Bentley, Richard, 103 Biophysics, I I 8
Bernard, Claude, 47, 97-99, Biopsy, 72, 77n
. 106 Biot, J. B., 99
on Bichat, I 3 2 "Birth of the clinic," 5 4
on cellular state, I 14 Blastema
concepts in writings of, 6 I- existence of, 6 3
63 Virchow rejects idea of, 64
on disease, 72-73 . Blood, as intraorganic envi
on microscopy, 1 17 ronment, 106
on organization, 1 3·3 Bonnet, C., 3 8
on Pasteur, 63-64 Borden, T. de, 89, 1 3 2
INDEX
Bos.suet, J. B., I 3 2 Charleton, Walter, 87, 92
Botany, cellular theory in, 6 Chemical evolution, I I 9
Brain, Comte on function of, Chemotherapy
97 invention of, 6 5-67
Brillouin, Leon, I42 preconditions for develop-
Broussais, F.-J. V. , 44, 47 ment of, 67-68
and Magendie, 5 9 Chromosomes, n4
physiological medicine of, Clark, Father Joseph T., I 2
56-57 Classifications, critical history
Brown, John, 5 5 of, I 8 , 22-23n
concept o f disease, 5 5 Clausius, R. J. E., 6I, 87
as the Newton of medicine, Clinical observation, 4 5
45 Clock, as model for animal
system of, 4I-50 machine, 84
therapeutic activism of, 89 Coenzymes, 6
Buchner, Eduard, 5 Cohnheim, Julius, 65
Buffon, G. L., 3 8, 9 I Collapsus, 44
on quantity o f life, 9 2 Comte, Auguste, 4 7
on species, I 3 4 beliefs of, 94-9 5
on Cartesian automatism, 96
Cabanis, P. J . G. on environment and orga-
on ideology, 29 nism, 9 6-97
influence of, 4 5 on materialism, 9 6
Calorific regulation, 98 on religion, 96
Calorification, 98, 99 Conservation, 87
Cardiac depressor nerve, 99, Continuity, I 6
IOO Copernicus, N., I, I o, 28
Carnap, R., I 3 Correns, Karl Erich, I I 2
Carnot, Sadi, 6I, 8 7 Corvisart, J.-N., 54
Caro, H.; 67 Cosmic magnetism, 44
Cavailles, Jean, I 3-I4 Cosmology, revolution in, I-2
Caventou, J. B., 5 8 Counterstimulism, 4 3
Cell theory Cowpox, 5 2
generalization of, I o7-Io8 Crick, Francis, n 6
theory of evolution and, I 08 Crisis, Hippocratic notion of,
Cellular development, 64 94
Cellular pathology, 6 5 Crystals, 69-70
Cellular speciation, I 2I Cudworth, Ralph, 84
Cellular theory Cullen, William, 44
Bernard and, 63 Cuvier, Georges, IOin
origins of in botany, 6 on Aristotle, I 2 7
Chabry, 8 I on Brownism, 4 I-43
Chain, E . B., 66 Cybernetics, 8 2, IOI
"Chain of being," 3 8, 126 Cyon, Elie de, 99, Ioo
Chance, I 2I Cytology, I 14-n 5
Character, 3 4
INDEX
Dagognet, Franc;ois, on Pas Bernard on, 72-73
teurism, 69-70 Broussais on, 5 6
Daremberg, Charles, 44 Brown vs. Bichat on, 5 5-5 6
on Broussais and Brown, 4 7 classes of, 4 3
on regulation, 90-9 I limitation of Bernard's
Darwin, Charles theory of, 62
conceptual framework of, 9 new nomenclature of, I40
influence of on Spencer, 3 6- Stahl on, I 3 2
37 DNA (desoxyribonucleic
on origin of life, I I 9 acid), l I 3 , I I 6, r r 7
question of heredity and, structure of, I 7
Io9-1 10 as superreal, I I 7
on role of variation, I 3 6- Dobzhansky, T., 105
I37 Domag, Gerhardt, 66
theology and, I 3 8 Driesch, Hans, 8I, IOI
Darwin, Erasmus, 4 I DuBois-Reymond, E. H., 6I
Darwinism, 1 22, I 3 8 Duhem, Pierre, I 5 , I 6
Death Duncan, A., l 3 2
as biological problem, I 4 3 Dupuy de Lome, S. C. H., 8 2
Buffon on, I 3 7 Dutrochet, R . J . H., 49n, 6 4
Darwin on, 1 3 7
Linnaeus on, l 3 7 Ecological equilibrium, theory
Debilitation, 4 3 of, 92
Democritus, 3 3 Economy, technology, physiol
Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 7 ogy, and, 87-94. See also
Descartes, Rene, l Animal economy
clock as model for, 84 Eggs, 8 I
contradicts Aristotle, I 29- Ehrlich, Paul, 5 2, 65-67
131 Einstein, Albert, 6
Hippocrates and, l 3 l Embryology, 107-108
on life as aspect of mechan- Encyclopedists, 9 l
ics, 1 3 0 Engels, Friedrich, 105-1 06
modern life science and, l 2 5 Entwicklungsmechanik, 8 l
on practice, 8 Environment
on self-preservation, l 3 l Comte on, 9 5 , 9 6-97
Destutt de Tracy, A. L. C., 29 effect of on organism, l 20-
Determinism, 6 1 12I
Dialectical materialism, l 7 internal, 97-98
Digestion, as regulator, 9 I Enzymes, 5-6
Diphtheria, treatment of, 6 5- Eobionts, n9
66 Epicurus, 3 3
Discontinuity, epistemology Epigenesists, 3 5
of, I I, 1 6 Epistemological break, 5 ,
Disease 22nn, 3 2, 40, 6 l
asthenic, 4 3 Epistemological recursion, 1 2,
14
INDEX
153 · Epistemology Newton confirms cosmology
�thical criteria for, 4-5 of, 103
focus of, 3 Galvani, L., 43
and history, 8-10 Galvanism, 53
invention of term of, l 9n Garrod, A. E., 140
Equilibrium, state, l 3 9 Gassendi, P., 1 3 2
Error, 13 5, 140-141 Gegenbaur, Karl, 106
Etiology, specific, 72 Generation
Evolution, 1 19, 1 3 8 . See also heredity and, 109-1 10
Darwin, Charles Maupertuis on, l 3 5
Evolutionism Genetic homeostasis, l l 6
as scientific ideology, 3 6-3 7 Genotypes, mutations of, l 20
Spencer's, 105 Germs, study of, I I 5-I I 6
Exceptional, as abnormal, l 29 Geymonat, Ludovico, l 5
Excitability Gillispie, Charles, 104
cosmic magnetism and, 44 Gley, Emile, 44
physiology of, Leibbrand on, God
44 Koyre on, 8 5
Experimental medicine, 5 3 , Leibniz on,.84- 87
5 8-60 Newton on, 84-87
Experimentation Goethe, J. W., 44
on humans, 59 Goldstein, Kurt, l 44
on self, 60 Governor
Exstimulare, 4 5 use of with regulator, 84-8 5
Watt's use of, 8 8, 89
Faye, H. A. E. de, 8 2 · Graebe, C., 67
Fermentation, 7 3 Gramme, Zenohe, 62
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 3 l Greene, Marjorie, 144
Fixism, I I 6 Grmek, D., 2on
Flemming, Walter, I I4 on internal liquid environ
Florey, H. W., 66 ment, 97
Florkin, Marcel, 5
Flourens, M. J. P., 59, 10rn Haeckel, E. H., I I4
on regulateur, 8 3 Hales, Stephen, 5
Force, 1 3 3 Haller, Albrecht von, 44
Foucault, Michel, 54, 8 7 Harris, John, 84
Fourcroy, A.-F. de, 4 5 Harvey, William, l, 5 2
Fredericq, Leon, loo Health, Hippocratic principle
Freud, Sigmund, 5 3 , 103 of, 93-94
Functions, 8 2 Hemophilia, 140
Hereditary transmission, ide
Galileo, l ology of, 3 5
Descartes and, l 3 o Heredity
Koyre on, 1 5 as delegation of ordinal
modern life science and, l 2 5 power, 1 3 8
INDEX
154 Heredity (cont.) theory of natural selection
generation and, 109-I I o as, 105
ideology of, 3 4-3 6 Immunity, discovery of, 6 5-67
Mendelian theory of as sci- Incitability, 4 5
ence, 3 4-3 5 Incitare, 4 5
new concept of, l 7 Incitation, theories of, 42
Herschel, Sir William, 142 Influence, 9
Hertwig, Oskar, 8 1, 108 Information, organization as,
Hippocrates 141
as father of biology, l 27 Ingenhousz, Jan, 5
Malthus quotes, 9 3, 94 Institut Pasteur, l 1 6
naturalism of, l 29 Internal environment
on power of self- blood as, 106
preservation, 89 concept of, 97-9 8
principle of on self Internal molds, Buffon's
regulation, 9 l theory of, l 3 4
Hippocratic medicine, return Internal secretion, 97
to, 5 3 lnterscientific object, I I 7
His, Wilhelm, 8 l lntraorganic environment. See
Histopathology, 72 Internal environment
History of science Irritability, 44-4 5
as series of ruptures, I I 6 Irritare, 4 5
theory of, 2 7:--2 8 Isotropy, 8 1
Hoffmann, Frederick, 89, 90
Homeostasis, I O I Jacob, Fram;ois, 1 6, 9 1
genetic, I I 6 Jenner, Edward, 5 2
and living things, I 39-I40 Journal of Experimental Phys
Hormones, 9 8 iology, 5 8
Horoscopic science, 2 8
Hubble, E . P., 142 Kant, Immanuel, 1 0
Human intervention, Buffon/ Kekule, F. A., 67
Maupertuis on, l 3 5 Klinefelter's syndrome, 140
Hume, David, 8 8 Koch, Robert, 63 , I I 5
Humors, 64 Kohler, Wolfgang, 19n
Huntington's chorea, I40 Kolliker, Rudolf Albert von,
Huygens, Christian, I 3 1 108
invention of, 84 Kossel, Albrecht, II 3
Hybridization Koyre, Alexandre
Maupertuis on, 3 4 on Galileo, 1 5
Mendelian concept of, 3 5 on God, 8 5 , 86
Hyperthyroidism, 140 Kuhn, Thomas
on "normal science," 1 2, 1 3
Ideologues, 29-3 0 Russo on, 1 3
Ideology
definition of, 29 Labor
Marx on function of, 3 2 cellular division of, I 2 I
INDEX
155 concept of physiological divi Limoges, Camille, 9 2, 104
sion of, 8 8 on concept of adaptation, 9-
Laboratory rationalism, politi- 10
cal radicalism and, l 2 5 Linnaeus, Carl von
Laennac, R. T. H., 5 4 on coexistence of life forms,
Lagrange, J. L., 9 5 133
Lalande, J. J., 8 8 on quantity o f living things,
Lamarck, J. B., 96 92
on biology, l 26 on species, l 3 4
on cosmic time, 108 Lister, Joseph, 71
Laplace, P. S., 9 5 Littre, M. P. E., 82
determinism of, 6 l Liver, glycogenic function of,
on regulation, 86-87 97
Latent life, 98 Locke, John, 1 3 2
Laurent, Auguste, 5 2, 1 22 Logical positivism
Lavoisier, A. L., l Cavailles and, 1 3-14
on regulation, 90-92 Kuhn and, 1 3
"regulators of animal ma Lotze, Hermann, l o o
chine" of, l 3 l Louis, P.-C.-A., S7
on respiration, 99-100 Lucretius, 33, 1 20
Law of conservation of energy, Ludwig, Carl, 99, l oo, 106
36 Luria, Salvador, l 3 8
Lecourt, Dominique, l l Lwoff, L., 141, 142
on Bachelard, 1 7
Leeches, use of, 5 6 , 74n Mach, Ernst, 6
Leibbrand, Werner Macleod, John James Rich
on axiomatic force, 4 5 ard, n 3
on physiology of exitability, Macromolecular biochemistry,
44 1 3 9-140
on vitalism, 46 Magendie� Fran�ois, 4 7
Leibniz, G. W., l , 1 3 2 Broussais and, 5 9
as Cartesian, 84-87 experimental medicine of,
concept of God of, 8 3-87 5 8-60
Leipzig Institute, l 17 self-characterization of, 60
Life Magnetism, 5 3
Aristotle on, 128 Malebranche, N., 5 3
Bernard on, 1 3 2-1 3 3 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 93-
Cuvier on, 1 4 5n 94
Descartes on, l 3 o Marion, Henri, 44
research on origins of, l l 8- Mariotte, Edme, 5 3
1 20 Marx, Karl, 23n, 29-3 2
Life expectancy and disease, Materialism, Comte refutes,
5 3-54 96
Life sciences since Darwin, Materialist injunctions, 125
103-1 23 Mathematical reasoning, Ca
vailles on, 1 3-14
INDEX
Mathematics, revolution in, Microscopic pathology, and
I-2 treatment of tumors, 64-6 5
Matter, macromolecular struc Miescher, Johann Friedrich,
ture of, 1 19 1 13, I I4
Maupertuis, P. L., 1 2n Mirbel, C. F. Brisseau de, 6,
and ideology of heredity, 3 4- 64
35 Mitscherlich, E., 69
and theory of generation, Mongolism, 140
1 3 4-1 3 5 Monsters, existence of, r 29
Mediate auscultation, 5 4 Montpellier School, 46
Medical ideologies Stahl and, 89, 1 3 2
John Brown's system as, 4 1- Morgagni, G . B., 47
50 Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 105
in 19th century, 25-40 Mosaic eggs, 8 r
Medical theory Multicellular organisms, r 14-
development of, 4 1-4 3 115
end of, 5 1-77 Mutant gene, 140
Medicine Mutations, r 1 6
ancient, 5 2 Koyre on, 22n
European, 5 4-5 5
experimental, 5 3, 5 8-60 Nagel, Ernest, 1 2
Hippocratic, 5 3 Nageli, Karl Wilhelm von,
modern, 5 2 III
new model of, 5 4-5 5 Napoleon, ideologues and,
physiological, 5 6-57 29-3 0
teaching of, 4 3 Natural economy, concept of,
Mendel, Gregor, 1o5 9
dual history of, r r r-r r 3 Natural history, 87, 1 3 3 , 1 3 4
and heredity as discipline, Natural selection
I IO-I I 3 concept of, 9
as historical pleonasm, r r 2 as filter, 1 4 3
Maupertuis and, 3 4-3 5 heredity and, 109-no
Mendeleev, Dmitri, r 4 3 natural extermination and,
Mendelsohn, E., 107 109
Mesology, 94 theory of, as eliminative, 1 3 6
Message, as new concept, 17 theory of, as id,eology, ro 5
Messmer, F., 4 3 Naturalism, 1 29
Metabolism, innate errors of, Nature, Descartes on, 1 29-
140 131
Metals, presence of in en- Naturphilosophie, 5 5
zymes, 5-6 Negentrophy, 1 4 1, 142
Metchnikoff, Elie, n 5-1 1 6 Negotium otiosum, 90
Meyerson, Emile, 1 6 Neo-Mendelians, r r 6
Microbiology, 1 1 5-1 1 6 Nervous fluids, mobility of,
influence of Pasteur on, 107 44
INDEX
1 57 Nervous system defined, 8 3
Bernard on, 62-63 as equilibrium, l 2on
as · source ofvitality, 44 form of, 1 29
Neumann, J. von, 14 l as machine, 9 l-9 2
Neurosis, concept of, 44 multicellular, l 14-r r 5
Newton, Sir Isaac, l, 61 new model of, 90
and concept of God, 84-87 pluriaellular, 107
and confirmation of Galileo, role of animal economy in
103 shift to, l 3 l
providentialism of, 103-104 Stahl on, l 3 2
Noncellular fermentation, 5 study of origin of life from,
Nonscience, 3 3 107
Normal science, 1 2-1 3 study of and society, 87, 92
Normality unicellular, l 07, l 14-l l 5
in biological thought, 1 25- Organization
145 Bernard on, l 3 3
concept of in biology, 143- as new biological concept,
144 17
Darwin and new criterion of, Organon, 1 28.-129
1 3 7-1 3 8 Oscillating life, 9 8
normal science and, 1 2-1 3 Ovists, 3 5
Norms of scientificity, 3 3
Norms of vertification, 39 Pages, Robert, 23n
Novalis, 44, 5 5 Pain, 60
Nuclein, I I 3 Paley, William, lo 3
Parablasts, theory of, 108
Ogle, William, 128 Paradigm, l 3
Ollier, Leopold, 71 Pasteur, Louis, 63-64, 68-71,
Ontology, 8 l 106
Oparin, Aleksandr, l l 9 chemical methods of, l l 5
Optimism, 8 6 influence on microbiology of,
Order, 1 3 5, 1 3 9 107
. Organ on origin of life, n 8-n9
derivation of term, l 3 2 Pathogeny, 6 3
Descartes op., 129-1 3 1 Pathology, 64, 1 3 8-1 3 9
Organic evolution, l l 9 Pavlov, I. P., 1 21
·Organic functions, 8 2 Pelletier, P. J ., 5 8
Organic incitability, 4 1 Pendulum, isochronous, l 3 l
Organic molecules, 3 8, 1 3 4 Penicillin, chemical synthesis
Organic phenomena, 4 7 of, 66
Organisms Percussion, 5 4
behavior of, l 07 Perier, Casimir, 5 7, 74n
effect of environment on, Perkin, William, Sr., 67, n4
120-1 21 Perspiration, as regulator, 91
Comte on, 95, 96-97 Pfliiger, Eduard, 8 l
INDEX
1 58 Pharmaceutical chemistry, 5 9 Regulateur, 82- 8 3 . See also
Phenic acid, 71 Regulation
Physiological oscillation, 98 as spiral spring, 8 8
Physiology Regulation, 82- 8 3 , 1 3 1 . See
Bichat on, 1 3 8-1 3 9 also Regulateur
conceptual advance o f Ger in artificial navigation, 8 8-
man, 99-101 89
economy, technology, and, Comte on, 99
87-94 concept of, l 3 l
as independent discipline, 5 4 concept of and living things,
as laboratory science, l 07 13 9-140
revolution in, 1-2 by e_xterior, 94-99
Plant nutrition, de Saussure's first treatises on, 90-9 1
work on, 6 ·
by interior, 94-99
Plantefol, Lucien, 3 Leibniz on, 8 6, 8 7
Platner, Felix, 1 3 2 Lotze's use of, 1 00
Pluricellular organisms, study origin of term, 8 2
of development of, 1 07 physicotheology of, 8 3-87
Polarimetry, 69 Regulator
Polyscientific object, 1 1 7 Bernard on, 9.8-99
Poncelet, J. V., 8 2 governing animal machine,
Popper, Karl, l 3 91
Population, principle of, 9 3- introduction of into physiol-
94 ogists' lexicon, 8 8
Population genetics, 1 0 5 Religion, 96
Pouchet, Felix, 1 06, I I 8 -I I9 Remak, Robert, 1 07-108
Preformationists, debate of Respiration, as regulator, 91,
with epigenesists, 3 5 99-100
Primum non nocere, 5 3 Ritter, J. W., 43
Progress RNA (ribonucleic acid), 1 14
Bernard on, 61 Rothschuh, K. E., 1 00
fundamental shifts necessary Roux, Wilhelm, 65-66, 8 1
for, 54, 70-71 Rule, definition of, 8 6
Protobionts, 1 19 Rush, Benjamin, 4 1
Psychology, history of, 28 Russo, Father Fran�ois, on
Kuhn, 1 3
Quarantines, introduction of,
60 Saint-Hilaire, E . Geoffroy, 49n
Salvarsan, 66
Rabies, etiology of, 76n Santorius, S., 1 3 0
Radl, Emil, 1 2 5 , 1 28 Saussure, Theodore de, 6
Ranke, Leopold von, 2 Savery, Thomas, 8 8
Rationalism, 1 8, 67, 68, 125 Schelling, F. W., 4 3 , 5 5
Reductionism, 1 2 5 , 1 3 o Schiller, J , 107
. ·
Regulated eggs, 8 1 Schleiden, M. J , 64

. ·
INDEX
1 59 Schmalhausen, Ivan Fedoro- Singer, Charles, 1 6-1 7, I 27
vich, I I I Smith, J. A., l 28
Schrodinger, Erwin, 1 4 I Society for Biology, 94
Schwann, T. A. H., 64 Solar system, 9 5
Science Soul, I 28 .
as articulated truths, 3 8-39 Sovereign Moderator, 92
as cultural form, 27 Species, l 3 3-l 3 6
definition of, I I Specific etiology, 72
economic/political theory of, Spencer, Herbert
3 I-3 2 evolutionism of, 105
enlightenment and, IO evolutionist ideology of, 3 6-
gap between philosophy and, 37
7 Spiral spring, l 3 I
history of, I 8 Sprengel, Kurt, l, 2
obsolete, 3 9 Stahl, Georg Ernst
a s process o f purification, 39 on disease, l 3 2
valid, 39 on irreducibility of organism,
Scientific ideology I32
ambition of, 3 3 o n vitalism, 8 9
. definition of, 5 7-5 8 Stahlianism, 467
development of, 3 6-3 8 Statistical methods, introduc-
history of, 3 2-3 3 tion of, 57
history of science and, 2 7-28 Stereometry, 69
superstition and, 3 3-34 Sthenic disease, 4 3
Scientific progress, discontinu- Stimulation, as therapeutic
ity in, I I act, 43
Scientific revolutions, 6 I Strasburger, Eduard Adolf,
Self-experimentation, 60 II4
Self-preservation Sulfamides, 6 6
Descartes on, I 3 I Superstition
Hippocrates on, 89 definition of, 3 3
self-regulation and, I 28 scientific ideology and, 3 3-
Self-regulation, self- 34
preservation and, I 28 Voltaire on, 2 7
Semmelweis, I. P., 7I Surgery, 71
Senebier, Jean, 5 Survival, 105
Sequard, Brown, 9 8 Sydenham, T., 4 7
Serotherapy, 68 Sympathetic accelerator
Serres, Michel, I 8, 22n, 23n nerves, 99
Servomechanisms, theory of, Synthetic aniline stains, 6 5
I2I Systemic improbability, 141
Setchenov, Ivan, Io6
Shiga, K., 66 Technology, 87-94
Sickness, as biological prob Teleology, 8 1
lem, 143 Teleonomy, 1 7
TNnF.X
1 60 Temkin, Owsei, 44 Watt, James, 8 8 , 89
Thematic conservation, prin Weber brothers (E. H. and
ciple of, 1 27-1 28 W. E.), 99
Theory Weismann, August, 1 1 4-1 1 5
Bernard on, 6 l Whytt, Robert, 1 3 2
as guide to practice, n o Wilson, Edmund, 8 l
Popper's emphasis on, l 3
Therapeutic skepticism, 5 4
Time, 108-109
Tonnelat, Marie-Antoinette, 6
"Top-down method," 1 2
"Total potentiality," definition
of, 8 1- 8 2
Treviranus, G. R . , 1 26-1 27
Tschermak, Erich, l l 2
Tumors, microscopic pathol-
ogy and treatment of, 64-
65
Unicellular organisms, study

of, 107, n4-n 5
Vaccination, importance of,

52
Vaccine
introduction of, 5 2
and Spanish physicians, 73n
Vagus nerves, 99
Variation, 13 6
Vesalius, Andreas, 5 2
Vienna School, 1 2 5
Vigorare, 4 5
Virchow, Rudolf, 63-65, rn6,
108
on cellular state, I I4
on pathology, 64
Vis medicatrix naturae, 89
Vitalism
Bichat's, 1 3 2
Leibbrand on, 4 6
Volta, A. G., 4 3
Voltaire, 2 7
Vries, Hugo Marie de, 1 1 2
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 1 I 1

Watson, James, I I 6
Bilken_t: .Uni��&fij
ii.A'ln....

John Canguilhem - Ideology and Rationality in The History of The Life Sciences-MIT Press (1988)

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Ideology and Rationality in the History of the

translated by Arthur Goldhammer

The MIT Press

Originally published under the title Ideologie et rationalite dans l'histoire

This book was typeset by Graphic Composition Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Canguilhem, Georges, l 904-

Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences.

Translation of: Ideologie et rationalite clans l'histoire des sciences de

Translator's Preface vii

Introduction: The Role of Epistemology in

I Scientific and Medical Ideologies in the

l What Is a Scientific Ideology? 27

II Triumphs of Biological Rationality in the

4 The Development of the Concept of Biological

Georges Canguilhem was born in I904. He studied and

To err is human, to persist in error is diabolical. It is not

*[Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences was p�blished

To anyone who would examine the relations between epis­

THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

parture. Each such trajectory has its own characteristic

THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

extended to other areas of the history of science withoqt_a

actually changes with each epistemological break, even if

THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

THE ROLE O F EPISTEMOLOGY

THE ROLE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

"epistemological break" in Le Rationalisme applique (1949 ) .

THE ROLE O F EPISTEMOLOGY

What is a scientific ideology? This is a question that arises,

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

Is the notion of scientific ideology relevant? Is the term a

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

Scientific ideology, unlike a political class ideology, .is_nqt

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

psychology. To the antiscience of religion they opposed

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

See Voltaire, "Prejudice," in the Philosophical Dictionary.

Report entitled "Factors Affecting the Development of the His

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

It is · hard to account tod�y for the contemporary success

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

Paris: Vrin, 1970.

Joseph Bertin. Paris: Barrois, 1 79 8 .

Georges Cuvier, Histoire des progres des sciences naturelles de­

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

Jadelot (Paris: I 799), see pp. 9, 2I9.

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

Nothing in the history of science is more instructive than

To simplify (probably to excess) the differe.1;1ce between an­

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

con and Descartes, to preserve health and to avoid or at

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, probably the

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL IDEOLOGIES

To anyone who would examine the relations between epis

Georges Cuvier, Histoire des progres des sciences naturelles de

To simplify (probably to excess) the differe.1;1ce between an

A year before his death, Claude Bernard, writing the in

Bernard never really understood Virchow, despite the lat

As everyone knows, surgery, already fortified by the inven

In the preface to the Theodicy (1710), Leibniz gives an ar

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