François Magendie

by J.M.D. Olmsted

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read Olmsted's biography of Claude Bernard I wanted to read this book. It was Magendie who created the field of experimental physiology. This book documents that quite well, providing clear descriptions of some of his important early experiments. It also discusses the 'paradigm shift' [I use the word advisedly] that he initiated. In 1809 Magendie wrote a theoretical paper that Olmsted characterizes as a revolt against Bichat's vitalism. Vitalists saw organisms as inherently unpredictable and thus argued for observation and description rather than experimentation. Magendie insisted that regularities could be found and experiments were possible. This is an oversimplification, but suggests what the shift in thinking was about. After finishing the book, I found an article by W.F. Albury "Experiment and Explanation in the Physiology of Bichat and Magendie," Studies in the History of Biology, (1977) 47-131. This article takes on the oversimplification in Olmsted and provides a very interesting contextualization of Magendie's work. The appendix of the article also has an english translation of Magendie's 1809 article that I was unable to find anywhere else.