Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis was a French physiologist, freemason and materialist philosopher. At first and ardent Bonapartist, justifying the need for a strong leader, he became disenchanted and devoted himself to science.
Background
Cabanis was born on June 5, 1757, at Cosnac, France, the son of Jean Baptiste Cabanis, a lawyer and agronomist. Cabanis’s father was a landed proprietor who was interested in agricultural innovations and experiments. He was also a friend of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, a French economist and statesman.
Education
At the age of ten, Cabanis was sent to the college of Вrives. He showed great aptitude for study, but his independence of spirit was so excessive that he was almost constantly in a state of rebellion against his teachers, and was finally dismissed from the school. From 1777 to 1783 he studied medicine at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, under the guidance of a noted doctor, Léon Dubreuil.
Career
From 1773 to 1775 Cabanis lived in Poland as secretary to Prince Massalsky, bishop of Vilna. He then traveled to Germany, and on his return to Paris he devoted himself mainly to poetry. About this time he sent to the Académie française a translation of the passage from Homer proposed for their prize, and, though he did not win, he received so much encouragement from his friends that he contemplated translating the whole of the Iliad.
At his father's wish, he gave up writing and decided to engage in a more settled profession, selecting medicine. In 1789 his Observations sur les hôpitaux procured him an appointment as administrator of hospitals in Paris. In 1794 the Convention had organized the Écoles Centrales, created by a decree of 1793, and Cabanis was named professor of hygiene. In 1795 he was elected a member of the Institut de France, in the class of moral sciences. Following the creation of the Écoles de Santé, which replaced the Facultés de Médecine in Paris, Montpellier, and Strasbourg, Cabanis held successively, in Paris, the positions of assistant professor at the École de Perfectionnement, of assistant to Corvisart in the chair of internal medicine, and of titular professor in the chair of the history of medicine and of legal medicine.
He was a member of the Council of Five Hundred and then of the Conservative senate, and the dissolution of the Directory was the result of a motion, which he made to that effect. But his political career was not of long continuance.
From inclination and from weak health he never engaged much in practice as a physician, his interests lying in the deeper problems of medical and physiological science. During the last two years of Honoré Mirabeau's life, Cabanis was intimately connected with that extraordinary man, and wrote the four papers on public education which were found among the papers of Mirabeau at his death, and were edited by the real author soon afterwards in 1791.
On April 22, 1807, Cabanis suffered his first attack of apoplexy. He died on 5 May 1808, at the age of fifty years and eleven months.
Politics
In 1797 Cabanis was elected to the Conseil des Cinq-Cents. He approved of Bonaparte’s coup d’etat of 18 Brumaire and was named senator. But his relations with Bonaparte, as first consul and then as emperor of the French, deteriorated as a result of distrust and mutual hostility. Cabanis refrained from attending the sessions of the Senate.
Views
As a philosopher, Cabanis sought in medicine an instrument for the analysis of ideas, that is to say, for the reconstruction of their genesis. In his fundamental philosophical work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, Cabanis sets forth a psychology and an ethical system based on the necessary effects of an animal’s organization upon its relationships with its environment.
As a physician, Cabanis considered, in the seventh memoir of the Rapports, the influence of illnesses on the formation of ideas and values. The text is a summary of his physiological and medical conceptions. It is without originality, especially in regard to the theory of fevers. Still, it helps us to understand the importance he attributed, from a moral and social point of view, to perfecting the art of medicine, “the basis of all the moral sciences.” Borrowing the word from the German philosophers, Cabanis termed the science of man anthropologie, the methodical joining of the physical history and the moral history of man.
In the epoch of the “Lumières,” all philosophy in France merged with politics. Cabanis’s medical philosophy was no exception. In seeking the most rational means of making men more reasonable by improvement of public health, Cabanis simultaneously sought to render physicians more knowledgeable and more effective by the reform of medical instruction. The reorganization of the hospitals seemed to meet this twofold requirement. This explains Cabanis’s interest in the question, which concerns both public health and medical pedagogy.