[Savages]. / Sauvages.

Francois Boissier Sauvages de la Croix (1706-1769) introduced in medical classification a naturalistic modality founded on orders, genders and species which was a model for Linneus. A former poet and polemist, the great thinker - a leader of the Montpellier School - devoted himself to the writing of a Nosologia for students. In the prolegonema of this Grand Oeuvre, we can find the development of a rigourous rationalistic epistemology based on systematicity, of a modern pre-structuralist and pre-positivist nature, while the clinician and practionner was fixed to a neohippoctatic and finalistic-animist mentality. The accent is put upon this astonishing contrast.

[Cabanis before the guillotine]. / Cabanis devant la guillotine.

In the beginning of "Year IV", Cabanis writes an Essay on the guillotine. Strangely enough, he advocated the scaffold against Soemmering and Süe on an argumented physiological ground, while he strongly condemns it from a political and moral standpoint. This ambivalence could be explained by the paradoxes of the culpability feelt by the humanist practitionner who had to represent the Paris Hospitals Commission when the machine to be the Great Terror's servant was tested, for the first time, by Louis, Guillotine and Pinel.

[G. W. Leibniz: medicine and the sciences of life: 2nd part: Leibniz as a "biologist"]. / G. W. Leibniz: médecine et sciences de la vie (2e partie: Leibniz "biologiste").

Many features of Leibniz's philosophy are a ... "naturalization" of the finding of contemporary scientists. For instance "the Monad", the fondamental element of his system, derives from Glisson's conceptions and Leeuwenhoek's observations. Among others, his ideas on generation stem from a mediation on the Dutchman's and Swammerdam's and Malpighi's works. Through them, he became a partner in the ovulists' quarrel and in the discussion about formal specification. Most of all, he expressed an amazing transformist and paleontological intuition, sensibilizing himself to comparative anatomy and to fossil imprints study. Generation and creative evolution of beings and species were logically accompanied by a reflection on death as being part of the life processes.

[You said Pinel?]. / Vous avez dit Pinel?

Pinel's action had to be "disabused". Pinel remains nevertheless a "mythical" figure of French Psychiatry even if he has not "removed the chains from the insanes", neither actually founded a "Subject in madness" nor, more simply, it's Moral Treatment. A Medical Practitioner and a neo-stoïcian Philosopher more than an Ideologist, when he stated a principle of curability and reversibility of mental alienation and classified it's clinical order of accessibility, his "founding gesture" was systematically associating those principles with the restoration of a status of Subject of Rights to those who lost their Reason.

[G. W. Leibniz: medicine and the sciences of life. Ist part: Leibniz as a "medical practioner]. / G.W. Leibniz: médicine et sciences de la vie (1re partie: Leibniz "médecin").

A universal thinker, Leibniz always expressed a marked interest for matters of life. A reader and a correspondent of the most famous physicians of his time, he exhorted them - with some results - to found their theories on the ground of detailed comparative observations and of verified experiments, firmly distinguishing scientific and metaphysic points of view. He worked out a primal organismic theory, but devoted himself mostly to set up a coherent medical training programme and a requiring health policy. Nevertheless, beyond anecdote, Leibniz never pretended to be a medical practioner, but thought he was a "medically-minded" philosopher.