François Magendie received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Paris on 24 March 1808 after defending a dissertation entitled Essai sur les usages du voile de palais avec quelques propositions sur la fracture du cartilage des côtes.
Career
Gallery of François Magendie
1803
Unsigned oil portrait painting of François Magendie (ca. 1803) by Paulin Jean Baptiste Guérin (courtesy of the Collège de France, Paris).
François Magendie received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Paris on 24 March 1808 after defending a dissertation entitled Essai sur les usages du voile de palais avec quelques propositions sur la fracture du cartilage des côtes.
Francois Magendie was a French experimental physiologist. He was the first to prove the functional difference of the spinal nerves.
Background
François Magendie was born on October 6, 1783, in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France to the family of Antoine Magendie, a surgeon, and Marie Nicole de Perey. He had a younger brother, Jean-Jacques, whose name testifies to the admiration their father, an ardent republican, had for the ideas of Rousseau. The two boys were brought up in accord with Rousseau’s pedagogical precepts: the emphasis was on their personal independence and not the instruction they received. In 1791, swept along by the Revolution, the Magendie family moved to Paris, where the father devoted himself more to politics than to medicine. The death of his mother in 1792 and his father’s activities on Revolutionary committees threw Magendie still further upon his own intellectual resources.
Education
Having reached the age of ten without having attended a school or having learned to read and write, at his own wish François Magendie entered elementary school, where he made very rapid progress. At the age of fourteen, he won the grand prize in a national contest for an essay on knowledge of the rights of man.
At sixteen, too young to be admitted to the École de Santé, Magendie became an apprentice at a Paris hospital, where the surgeon Alexis Boyer, a friend of his father’s, accepted him as a pupil and entrusted him with the anatomical dissections. In 1803 Magendie passed the examination required for an interne des hôpitaux and entered the Hôpital Saint-Louis as a medical student. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Paris on 24 March 1808 after defending a dissertation entitled Essai sur les usages du voile de palais avec quelques propositions sur la fracture du cartilage des côtes. Magendie’s studies reflect the chaotic situation of teaching in France during the period.
In 1807 he became an assistant in anatomy at the École de Médecine and gave courses in anatomy and physiology. In 1811 Magendie was appointed anatomy demonstrator at the Faculté de Médecine of Paris, and for three years he taught anatomy and surgery. He displayed unusual skill during his operations at the École Pratique. Meanwhile, his rude behavior precipitated a conflict with the professor of anatomy, François Chaussier. The professor of surgery, Guillaume Dupuytren, saw Magendie as a dangerous rival and created difficulties for him at the Faculté de Médecine. In 1813 Magendie resigned from his post as a demonstrator, opened an office as a practicing physician, and organized a private course in physiology. In his éloge Flourens speaks of a veritable “volte-face”: in his opinion, Magendie suddenly buried all his ambitions as an anatomist and surgeon in order to devote himself to experimental physiology. Whether it was a long-considered project or simply an impulsive act cannot be known; in any case, his private courses, featuring experiments on living animals, aroused the curiosity of the medical public and soon enjoyed a large success.
Magendie’s teaching was not only oral. The interest evoked by his courses led him to write Précis élémentaire de physiologie, in which, just as in his lectures, experimental demonstration replaced theoretical discussion as much as possible. He thus created a new type of physiology textbook: philosophical deductions founded on anatomy and on doctrinal suppositions were greatly reduced in favor of simple and precise descriptions of experimental facts. The first volume of the Précis was published in 1816, the second in 1817. This work, which went through four French editions and was translated into several other languages, including English and German, exerted a very profound influence on physicians and biologists during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Although Magendie was interested primarily in experimental physiology, he did not neglect medical practice. For many years he suffered from not being on a hospital staff, which would have facilitated the clinical study of new medicines. In 1818, following a competitive examination, he was named to the Bureau Central des Hôpitaux Parisiens; but until 1826 he had no official hospital assignment and had to rely on the understanding of his friend Henri Husson in order to observe treatments and to give a clinical course at the Hôtel-Dieu. In 1819 he was requested to give a course at the Athénée Royal. In 1821 he published the first edition of his Formulaire pour la préparation et l’emploi de plusieurs nouveaux médicaments, a therapeutical manual much used by physicians. Magendie introduced into medical practice a series of recently discovered alkaloids; strychnie, morphine, brucine, codeine, quinine, and veratrine. He also generalized the therapeutic use of iodine and bromine salts. Contrary to the dominant opinion among the older physicians, Magendie favored the use of chemical substances over that of natural drugs and, in addition, had great confidence in pharmacological experiments on animals. He did not hesitate to test on himself all the substances that were shown to be harmless in the animal experiments.
Between 1813 and 1821 Magendie made a great many discoveries in almost all the fields of research that then constituted physiology. Among these were proof of the passive role of the stomach in vomiting; explanation of the mechanism of deglutition; experiments on alimentation with nonnitrogenous substances (demonstration of the mammals’ need for a protein supply and the first experimental production of an avitaminosis); experiments on digestive properties of pancreatic juice; proof of the liver’s decisive role in detoxification processes; demonstration of the hemodynamic importance of the elasticity of the arteries; discovery of emetine and experiments on the toxic action of hydrocyanic acid; comparative anatomical investigations clarifying the mechanism of absorption; and new observations following vivisections of cranial nerves. Magendie was also the first to make comparative nutrition experiments with chemically pure substances.
In 1821 Magendie was elected to the Académie des Sciences and the Académie Royale de Médecine. In the same year, he founded the Journal de physiologie expérimentale, the first periodical devoted exclusively to physiology. Starting with the second volume he added the words et pathologie to the title.
In 1823 Magendie produced experimentally and described the rigidity that follows decerebration; he provided the first proof of the cerebellum’s role in maintaining the equilibrium of the organism; and he cut the fifth pair of cranial nerves within the cranium itself, demonstrating the direct responsibility of these nerve structures for the sense of touch and their indirect trophic role in the maintenance of the function of the other senses. In 1824 he observed the circular movement (“mouvement de manège”) that occurs in the rabbit following the section of the cerebellar peduncle. This experiment was the point of departure for Bernard’s discovery of the “piqûre sucrèe” and, later, of Jacques Loeb’s experiments on the rotary movements of animals. During the period 1824–1828 Magendie made many discoveries concerning the origin, composition, and circulation of the cerebrospinal fluid. He showed that the brain cavities communicate freely with the spinal subarachnoid space and described the medial foramen in the roof of the fourth ventricle (foramen Magendie). Through severing the various branches of the facial never, Magendie succeeded in definitively banishing the ancient hypothesis of the “nervous fluid.”
During a trip to England in 1824, when he was a guest of William Hyde Wollaston’s, Magendie gave several public demonstrations of his method of the experimental section of cranial nerves of living dogs. The cruel side of his experiments provoked an antivivisectionist campaign. Although powerful in Great Britain, this struggle for the protection of animals found no echo in France. Some colleagues, however, reproached Magendie for having experimented on sick people - that is, for having performed operations the goal of which was essentially scientific and not therapeutic. Such proceedings are described in Magendie’s publications, but they were never really dangerous or mutilating. Particularly noteworthy are his experiments on the human retina, which could have led him, if he had a taste for theoretical generalization, to the discovery of the law of the specific energy of the senses.
In collaboration with Poiseuille, Magendie carried out fundamental studies on arterial pressure and demonstrated the hemodynamic role of the elasticity of the major arteries. He also showed the very poor nutritive value of gelatin, until then utilized in the hospitals as an inexpensive food. In 1846 Magendie demonstrated that the presence of sugar in the blood is not necessarily a pathological phenomenon. These experiments on glycemia served Claude Bernard as the starting point of the research that culminated in his discovery of the glycogenic function of the liver.
In 1830 Magendie finally obtained the directorship of a hospital department, the women’s ward at the Hôtel-Dieu. Despite everything that one could say concerning his gruff manners toward his colleagues and his cruelty to animals, contemporary testimony agrees on the gentleness, patience, and understanding with which he treated his hospital patients. On 4 April 1831, he replaced J. C. A. Récamier in the chair of medicine at the Collége de France. It was not without some difficulty that the medical instruction there was changed in style and in substance. Instead of expounding doctrines, Magendie gave public demonstrations of the experimental method; instead of teaching clinical medicine as it was practiced at the patient’s bedside, he concentrated on the presentation of physiological and pathological knowledge derived from studies made on animals. Nevertheless, his initial lectures at the Collège de France were devoted to a medical problem of current concern: cholera. Magendie had just made a trip to England, to Sunderland, where he had been able to follow closely an epidemic of this disease. After his return to Paris, cholera broke out there. Magendie fought it courageously and devised a good symptomatic treatment, but he was seriously mistaken in asserting that it was not contagious. He also denied the contagiousness of yellow fever and opposed quarantine.
This error had dire consequences, in particular after 1848, when Magendie was appointed the head of the Advisory Committee on Public Hygiene. Even though he belonged to the anticontagionist camp, Magendie had made a positive contribution to the study of infection: he had demonstrated experimentally that the saliva of rabid dogs contains a contagious principle. He also observed the effects of intravenous injections of putrid blood and led B. Gaspard to study the phases of sepsis by the experimental method (1822-1823). Another serious error of Magendie’s was his impassioned activity against surgical anesthesia induced by ether (1847).
From 1832 to 1838 Magendie delivered his famous lectures on the physical phenomena of life at the Collège de France. These lectures were dominated by two main ideas: to extend as far as possible the purely physical explanation of vital phenomena and to base medical practice on the certain knowledge of normal and pathological physiology. Among the discoveries belonging to this period, the most interesting is that concerning the phenomenon later called anaphylaxis: Magendie ascertained that the second injection of egg white results in the death of rabbits that had tolerated perfectly well the first injection of the substance.
Beginning in 1838 Magendie’s lectures dealt successively with the physiology of the nervous system, the dynamics of the circulation of the blood, the cerebrospinal fluid, and nutrition.
Through his marriage to Henriette Bastienne de Puisaye in 1830, Magendie had acquired an estate in Sannois, Seine-et-Oise. There he led a very happy family life. Yielding to the fatigue brought on by approaching old age, he withdrew more and more to his country house, left the Hôtel-Dieu (1845), and had Bernard substitute for him at the Collège de France (1847). At Sannois he undertook experiments in plant physiology with a view to improving agricultural yield. He died probably of a heart ailment.
François Magendie made pioneering efforts in the medical fields of physiology, pharmacology, pathology, and nutrition. More interested in facts than theory, his experiments led to such innovations as the introduction of various drugs into medical practice (such as strychnine and morphine) and the Bell-Magendie Law regarding the functioning of spinal nerves. Among his other contributions were his early description of cerebrospinal fluid and a delineation of a foramen (small opening) in the brain that later came to bear his name. Magendie greatly influenced the intellectual development of the renowned French physiologist Claude Bernard, one of his students (1841-1843). Magendie was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1821 and served as its president in 1837.
François Magendie's name has been given to several schools, including l'école Magendie in Sannois and lycée François-Magendie in Bordeaux, as well as the Neurocentre Magendie in Bordeaux dedicated to neuroscience research. Numerous streets and squares bear his name, including Rue Magendie in Paris, one in Bordeaux, one in Lormont and Toulouse.
After his thesis Magendie’s first publication was an article of a theoretical, not to say doctrinal, character. It appeared in the Bulletin des sciences médicales, which, published by the Société Médicale d’émulation, did its utmost to glorify the memory of Bichat; yet Magendie’s memoir was a harsh attack on the fundamental ideas of this intellectual master of French physicians. According to Magendie, the biological sciences had remained behind the physical sciences because they utilized complicated ideas and preconceptions to explain facts which very often were not themselves established with certainty. Magendie still accepted the concept of a vital force (considering it a supposition that served merely to bring together in a single term all the characteristics proper to life), but he proposed “to abolish the two vital properties known under the names of animal sensibility and animal contractility and to consider them as functions”.
Further, Magendie condemned Bichat’s attempt to increase the number of vital properties by distinguishing them according to the organic tissues. In Magendie’s view, physiology should explain the two phenomena essential to life - nutrition and movement - through reducing them to the organization of living beings and of their parts.
The gnoseological optimism of this youthful piece was rapidly replaced by a certain skepticism and a growing distrust of all theoretical generalization. Although he later honored Bichat by preparing his two major works for publication, Magendie furnished these editions with ample commentaries praising Bichat the experimenter but treating with irony all attempts at a systematic explanation of vital phenomena. The influence of the philosophy of the Idéologues had prevailed over the vitalist doctrines of the Montpellier school; and Magendie, having taken an aversion to all theories, made an extraordinary effort during most of his life to discover and collect the “facts” and refused, to the extent this was possible, to interpret them. This was, of course, an illusion: Magendie made his discoveries on the basis of certain theoretical considerations and within the framework of a rather well-defined philosophy of biology. But this illusion was particularly important at a moment in the history of physiology when it was necessary to replace excessive speculation with recourse to the “facts” - that is, with recourse to the experimental method. Magendie’s principal merit consisted in the influence he exerted in orienting physiology toward experimental investigations.
In 1809 Magendie presented to the Académie des Sciences and to the Société Philomatique the results of his first experimental work, which he carried out in collaboration with the botanist and physician A. Raffeneau-Delile. In a series of ingenious experiments on various animals, the two investigators studied the toxic action of several drugs of vegetable origin, particularly of upas, nux vomica, and St.-Ignatius’s bean. As Olmsted observes, these experiments mark the beginning of modern pharmacology. For the first time, an experimental comparison was made of the similar effects produced by drugs of different botanical origin. Magendie held that the toxic or medicinal action of natural drugs depends on the chemical substances they contain, and it should be possible to obtain these substances in the pure state. As early as 1809 he suspected the existence of strychnine, later isolated, in accord with his predictions, by P. J. Pelletier (1819). Moreover, in 1817, in collaboration with Pelletier, Magendie discovered emetine, the active principle of ipecac. Immediately after the isolation of strychnine, he demonstrated that it produces exactly the same type of poisoning as do certain vegetable drugs.
The experiments of 1809 enabled Magendie and Raffeneau-Delile to affirm that upas and nux vomica, which produce generalized convulsions and tetanus, must act on the spinal marrow and, in fact, must stimulate it very strongly. Sectioning the medulla - separating it from the brain - does not suppress the symptoms of the poisoning, whereas destruction of the medulla eliminates them completely. The character of the symptoms was found to be independent of the way in which the poison entered the organism, but the latter circumstance did influence the rapidity with which the first spasms began. Magendie thus formulated the principle of local action: A toxic or medicinal substance acts solely in terms of its direct contact with an effector organ. This principle obliged physiologists to accord great importance to the study of the absorption and transport of poisons and medicines in the organism.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the generally accepted view was that absorption takes place exclusively through lymphatic vessels. This theory, elaborated by John Hunter and reinforced by Bichat’s teaching, had replaced Haller’s opinion, according to which food and all other substances are absorbed through the veins. Magendie, however, demonstrated the existence of two absorption paths. He conducted a classic experiment in which a dog was poisoned following the introduction of the toxic substance into a limb that was connected to the body only by a blood vessel, or even only by a quill. Magendie concluded that the absorption of liquids and semiliquids is not a vital and physically inexplicable function of the lymphatics by a simple physicochemical phenomenon of the imbibition of tissues and of passage trough vascular walls.
In the introduction to his Précis, Magendie explained and justified his methods of investigating vital phenomena. Without abandoning his vitalist position (that is, he still accepted that “corps vitalist differ from “corps bruts” both in their form and composition and in certain supplementary laws that govern them), Magendie criticized the ontological interpretations of soul and of the vital principle. He rejected as a dangerous illusion the methodological analogy between the vital force and Newtonian gravitation. For him, vital force would remain an empty term as long as it was impossible to link it, on the example of universal attraction, to a precise law. According to Magendie, the laws of life, even if they possess their own character, cannot be in contradiction with the physicochemical laws. The first task of physiology was to push the physical analysis of vital phenomena as far as possible. In theory and in practice, therefore, Magendie preached an empirical reductionism.
Convinced that pathology is essentially “the physiology of the sick organism,” Magendie already envisaged a complete reform of medicine by establishing it upon the experimental study of the vital functions; the idea of this project was later brilliantly defended and developed by his disciple Claude Bernard.
It was in his Journal that Magendie published the results of his investigations on the physiology of the nervous system and on the cerebrospinal fluid. The discovery of the Bell-Magendie law (1822) was the source of a distressing dispute over the parts played by Charles Bell and by Magendie in distinguishing the motor and sensory roots of the medulla. Although it is possible that, from the start of his research on the spinal nerves, Magendie knew of Bell’s general idea through the latter’s assistant, John Shaw, it is nonetheless certain that the clear statement and the experimental verification of the law in question belong to him. This discovery, of fundamental importance for neurophysiology, was completed by Magendie and Claude Bernard with the experimental explanation of an apparent exception known as sensiblité récurrente (1847).
Quotations:
"[The] majority of physiological facts must be verified by new experiments and this is the only means of bringing the physics of living bodies out of the state of imperfection in which it lies at present."
"Two living bodies having the same organization will display the same vital phenomena; two living bodies having different organizations will display vital phenomena the diversity of which will always be in direct proportion to the difference in organization."
"I compare myself to a ragpicker: with my spiked stick in my hand and my basket on my back, I traverse the field of science and I gather what I find."
"In sum, Charles Bell had had, before me, but unknown to me, the idea of separately cutting the spinal roots; he likewise discovered that the anterior influences muscular contractility more than the posterior does. This is a question of priority in which I have, from the beginning, honored him. Now, as for having established that these roots have distinct properties, distinct functions, that the anterior ones control movement, and the posterior ones sensation, this discovery belongs to me."
Membership
Paris Philomathic Society
,
France
National Academy of Medicine
,
France
Turin Academy of Sciences
,
Italy
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
,
Sweden
French Academy of Sciences
,
France
Personality
A liberal education in his childhood, a practically oriented apprenticeship in medicine, the astonishing experience of the successive collapses of academic and doctrinal systems - all these combined to strengthen in Magendie a love of facts and a contempt for words, theories, and social conventions, as well as a rude frankness and a truly exceptional independence of judgment.
Magendie's abrupt style was to serve him ill throughout his career. Often seen as vain, rude, and contemptuous among his fellows, his personality often hindered his advancement and sometimes cost him positions. For example, all his surgical skill later displayed during his brief time at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris could not override the conflicts with the professors of anatomy (Francois Chaussier) and surgery (Guillaume Dupuytren) that caused him to resign his post as anatomy demonstrator after only two years. For all the hostility he engendered, however, Magendie's innovative work and electrifying insights could not be denied by even his harshest detractors.
Quotes from others about the person
"The new Émile, absolutely given over to himself, went about as he pleased in a liberty that very closely resembled abandonment." - Pierre Flourens.
"Mr. Magendie is not one of those men concerning whom one can give a sufficient idea simply by enumerating their works or by pointing out the discoveries with which they have enriched science." - Claude Bernard.
"Magendie joined example to precept. He undertook private courses of experimental physiology based on vivisections. He attracted numerous students, among whom were a great many foreigners. It was from this center that the young physiologists carried the seeds of the new experimental physiology into the neighboring schools, where it then developed with such prodigious rapidity." - Claude Bernard.
"A distinguished intellect, but skeptical and contemptuous, who believed only in the scalpel” and who claimed that the best medical system was to have none at all and to stick to the facts." - Honoré de Balzac.
Connections
François Magendie married the wealthy widow Henriette Bastienne de Puisaye in 1830 and acquired an estate in Sannois, Seine‐et‐Oise.
