Background
Paul Joseph Barthez was born on December 11, 1734, in Montpellier, France. He was the son of Guillaume Barthez de Mamiorières, chief engineer of Languedoc.
France, Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier
This big bronze monument of Paul Joseph Barthez can be seen, jointly with the similar one of François de Lapeyronie, at the entrance of the old Faculté de Médecine (Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine) in Montpellier.
Paul Joseph Barthez, French Physician.
Paul Joseph Barthez was born on December 11, 1734, in Montpellier, France. He was the son of Guillaume Barthez de Mamiorières, chief engineer of Languedoc.
Barthez received his early schooling in Narbonne and Toulouse and entered the medical school at Montepellier at the age of sixteen. Completing his degree in three years, he went to Paris, where he became a protégé of Falconnet, physician to Louis XV.
From 1755 to 1757 Barthez served as a physician with the French army. Upon returning to Paris, he was employed first as a royal censor and then as an editor of the Journal des savants. During this time he also contributed to the Encyclopédie edited by his friend d’Alembert.
Barthez returned to Montpellier about 1760 as professor of medicine and remained there for twenty years, becoming chancellor of the medical school in 1773. During this period he developed his vitalistic doctrines, expounding them in three books: De principio vitali hominis (1773), Nova doctrina de fonctionibus naturae humanae (1774), and his most important work, Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme (1778).
However, Barthez’s ideas were opposed by Barthez’s colleagues, and the controversy that it aroused caused him to resign his position at Montpellier in 1781.
Barthez returned to the literary and intellectual life of Paris. The Revolution stripped him of all his honors that he was granted, and sent him into retirement in southern France, where he spent the last two decades of his life studying and writing.
In 1798 he published Nouvelle méchanique des mouvements de l’homme et des animaux, in which he demonstrated, through very intricate anatomical analysis, that the simple hydraulic explanations offered by the latromechanists (particularly Borelli) would never explain the delicate balance and control of muscles that are needed for such motions as walking and swimming. During these years Barthez also published several practical medical handbooks and revised his Nouveaux éléments, which had been very popular in its earlier version.
With the coming of the Directorate, Barthez regained some of his former prominence. At the time of his death in 1806 he was personal physician to Napoleon and honorary professor of medicine at Montpellier.
Unfortunately, Barthez did not really practice what he had preached on the subject of clinical research. His works are almost wholly theoretical, and he was particularly adept at producing the teleological explanations which were anathema to later generations of physiologists.
Barthez’s vitalism is based on the distinction between three different types of phenomena - matter (la matière), life (la vie), and soul (l’âme). He argued that even if like effects follow from like causes, we cannot assume that the laws which govern one type of phenomenon will be meaningful when applied to another; life cannot be subsumed under the laws that govern matter, and it cannot be described in the same manner as the behavior of the soul.
Barthez denied both the mechanistic doctrines of Borelli and Boerhaave and the vitalism of Stahl and van Helmont. He thought that their approaches to physiology were illogical and totally useless since they yielded results that were either obviously wrong or incapable of being tested. In his view, life was a valid subject for investigation, but it needed its own distinctive science with unique principles and techniques.
One important aspect of this new science was the development of clinical teaching and research. Barthez thought that physicians should return to the inductive method of Hippocrates, learning the principles of physiology as they manifest themselves in the whole, living body.
Although his clinical research later became the basis for the superiority of French medical science in the nineteenth century, the idea was opposed by Barthez’s colleagues.
Barthez was a member of the Académie des Sciences and the Société Royale de Médecine. In 1784, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.