How to study life: Bichat's method

Although Bichat's only formal training was in surgery, his mature work, based upon a deliberate decision he made after Desault's death, was in anatomy and physiology. One of his most influential works, the Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, addressed the fundamental and timeless questions of the nature of life, the nature of death, and the ways in which these conditions of existence manifest themselves in an organism. The arguments developed in the book and the observations that reinforced them, were rooted in the assumptions of vitalism. Often, the experiments recounted appear haphazard and unfocused, a kind of "what if' approach rather than a deliberate attempt to address a question. It is unlikely that any of them could have jeopardized any of his a priori assumptions. The four-volume Anatomie generale was more satisfactory in this respect. It seems to have relied less upon a priori notions and more upon careful observations designed to analyse the tissues which compose the organs and other bodily structures. It is also the book whose reputation has best survived the years since its publication. Some of Bichat's detractors have charged that his work is merely synthetic, and contains nothing original at all. What justification there is for the claim stems from the fact that Bichat dealt extensively with themes common to the eighteenth century. In the following chapters, Bichat's work will be analysed in relation to the theoretical and epistemological views already considered. Nevertheless, Bichat was much more than a mere borrower. His fellow-physicians, his students, and his successors at the HotelDieu invariably described him as a tireless worker who performed a great many postmortem dissections as well as innumerable experiments on living animals. In this chapter, I wish to examine the method by which Bichat approached his work as well as some of its underlying assumptions. The premiss basic to much of Bichat's work, as we have already seen, was that the life sciences are utterly separate from those that treat non-living matter. He developed the arguments in support of that thesis in the first part of La vie et la mort, his most complete statement of physiology. He presented evidence there in support of a natural division of living phenomena into animal and organic categories and described five vital properties that derive from sensibility and contractility. By so doing, he took these phenomena from the domain of mere sensation and locomotion and elevated them to be the physiological causes of formation, growth, and nutrition. We are in a position to recognize here an amalgam of notions gleaned from the vitalists, the monists, and the sensationalists. Naturally, he was never without evidence to support his contentions. Looking at Bichat's arguments in support of the animal-organic division of life, we see him writing as the heir to a tradition of interpretation that had its distant roots in the work of Aristotle and its more recent ones in that of Barthez and Grimaud. The Montpellier tradition from the mid-eighteenth century maintained that observation is the sole reliable source of data about living creatures. This viewpoint