Background
Jean Pierre Flourens was born on April 13, 1794, at Maureilhan, near Beziers, Paris.
educator physiologist scientist
Jean Pierre Flourens was born on April 13, 1794, at Maureilhan, near Beziers, Paris.
At the age of fifteen he began the study of medicine at the University of Montpellier, where in 1823 he received the degree of doctor.
After graduating, with a letter of recommendation from the famous botanist Augustin de Candolle to Georges Cuvier, Flourens went to Paris, where he decided to abandon medicine and devote all his efforts and ingenuity to physiological research. The protégé of Cuvier, talented, unusually skillful in experimental work, industrious, persevering, and devoted to research and science, Flourens met with early success. In 1821 he was entrusted with lecturing on the physiological theory of sensations before the distinguished scientific Cercle Athénée, and this led him to deeper experimental study of nervous functions. The first results, presented to the Academy by Cuvier in 1822, earned Flourens notoriety and recognition among scientists.
In 1828 Cuvier made Flourens his deputy lecturer at the Collège de France, and he became professor in 1832. The next year, following a wish of Cuvier’s expressed before his death, Flourens succeeded him as permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences. One of his great achievements in this capacity was the founding, with Arago, of the Comptes rendus, reports of Academy meetings, which still constitute one of the most important scientific periodicals. In 1838 Flourens was elected deputy for Béziers, and two years later he won election to the French Academy against the celebrated poet Victor Hugo; the election was followed by bitter comments and criticism. In his remaining years Flourens devoted his activity mainly to scientific biographies and philosophical and popular writings.
Flourens’ distinguished scientific career began in 1822 with Cuvier’s presentation to the Academy of Sciences of the first in a series of his reports on the nervous system. They were collected into a volume in 1824, which was followed by a complementary volume in 1825, and were republished with supplementary material in 1842. These reports are a landmark in the history of the physiology of the nervous system. Flourens’ idea was to break down the complicated facts into their simple components, to separate all diverse occurrences, to find all distinguishable parts. The art of separating simple facts was for Flourens the whole art of experimenting. In his studies of brain functions he used mainly the technique of ablation - surgical removal of different parts to study their functions - examining systematically one part after the other to differentiate their functions.
Flourens distinguished three essentially distinct main faculties in the central nervous system: perception and volition, reception and transmission of impressions, and the excitation of muscular contractions. He distinguished excitability from contractility, which is the faculty of muscle to shorten when excited by an adequate stimulus. According to Flourens, the intellect and the faculty of perception reside in the brain proper, the faculty of immediate excitation of muscular contraction in the spinal cord; and the faculty of coordination of movements willed by the cerebral hemispheres resides in the cerebellum, lesions of which cause disturbances of coordination and of equilibrium. The idea of coordination introduced by Flourens has played an important role in nervous physiology. For Flourens every part of the brain had its specific function yet acted as a whole in respect to this function, just as the entire brain functioned as a whole. Thus he thought that there was no localization within each part: all perceptions could concurrently occupy the same seats in the forebrain. Flourens was strongly opposed to Gall’s phrenology.
Another important advance was Flourens’ discovery of compulsive movements of the head and disturbances of equilibrium after lesions of the semicircular canals of the inner ear. This was a puzzling phenomenon whose physiological background he could not elucidate. It was at that time extremely difficult to realize that the inner ear has not only the receptors of audition, but also, in its vestibular part, another type of receptor reacting to gravity and accelerative forces. It was explained only fifty years later, in 1873–1874, by Ernst Mach, Josef Breuer, and Alexander Crum Brown simultaneously.
In his biographies of distinguished scientists Flourens tried to sum up their achievements, relating their work to what was done before and after along the same lines, in a clear, simple, elegant, and engaging style. Some biographies are accompanied by more general studies on the related problems of the history of science. They were very popular, and some are masterpieces which served as models for other biographies.
Flourens was an opponent of Darwinism and criticized the idea of natural selection. He refuted the arguments of spontaneous generation. He was a creationist and defended the fixity of species. Flourens criticized Charles Darwin for personifying nature. He argued that natural selection is a contradictory term as nature does not select.
Flourens was a member of the Academy of Sciences.
In addition to all his achievements as a specialist, Flourens had a special ability to present and discuss scientific issues in a beautiful and understandable form. He was often authoritarian, imposing his opinion without caution or comparison of his experimental results and interpretations with those of other scientists. He was usually right, as in his opposition to Gall’s pseudoscience of phrenology, but sometimes wrong, as in his repudiation of every idea of localization in the brain.