Lucia di Palo, Le Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort di François Xavier Bichat: un lessico fisiologico, Bari, Cacucci Editore, 2005, pp. 224, €25.00 (paperback and DVD 88-8422-398-9).

Abstract

The situation of the history of science and, in particular, of the history of medicine in Italy reflects some contradictions that are typical of the discipline. Researchers from a variety of fields work in the history of medicine. Doctors, biologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers and philologists are the main actors in the discipline. Very often in Italy the different methodologies are not harmonized into an interdisciplinary approach, with the result that there are various strands to the history of medicine that have not yet come together. On one side there are the histories written by doctors, which focus mainly on medical ideas, theories and technical concepts; on another there is a more general approach to the history of ideas, in which medical theories are studied in relation to philosophy and culture; and on yet another there are some historians—still rare in Italy—that concentrate on sociology or philology. In general these three approaches, of the technical and the more general history of ideas, and the history of the conditions of the production of such ideas—that is, the history of society and language—have not yet converged. The University of Bari is one of two institutions in Italy that offers a PhD in history of science (the other is Florence and there are also some possibilities at Bologna and Naples). As a consequence, Bari has the advantage of appealing to many researchers from a variety of fields, and of supporting an interdisciplinary approach in history of science and medicine. Over the last few years, the Interdepartmental Centre of History of Science in Bari has promoted a computational analysis of scientific languages for historical purposes. Researchers at the Centre have created software that allows users to take a document converted into an electronic format (txt) and scan it for exact word position and frequency. The first two significant publications resulting from the application of this type of software are: Jean-Martin Charcot e la lingua della neurologia by Liborio Dibattista (Cacucci, Bari 2003), and Le Recherches physiologique sur la vie et la mort di Francois Xavier Bichat, the text reviewed here, which studies Bichat's physiology. Charcot and Bichat are considered the founders of two disciplines: neurology and physiology respectively. The basic hypothesis of both texts is that the creation of a new discipline corresponds to the creation of a new language, the analysis of which can give us further indications of the processes by which the new discipline has arisen. The software that Lucia di Palo has used is INTEX (created specifically for the French language), by which it is possible to find, for each word, the more frequent correspondences with other words, verbs or constructions. By analysing the words function, organ, and ownership, which appear very frequently in Bichat's Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, di Palo tries to analyse how Bichat built a new physiology. This physiology is based upon the concepts of animal and natural vital functions and upon the experimental analysis of the ownership of these functions. The organs, built by specific tissues, are the seats of these functions and through experimental analysis it is possible to understand how each function is put to use, that is, the nature of the ownership of each organ. The experimental analysis is lead by the selective suppression of the function of an organ in a given animal and by the observation of the functions that as a result are suppressed. Di Palo analyses also the experimental language of Bichat, in which we find a new relationship between observation and experimentation. Experimentation and observation are no longer in contrast, as in previous French natural philosophy, because Bichat presents the experiment as a more wide ranging form of observation. The most valuable aspects of di Palo's book are, first, that it gives quantitative proof concerning the way in which this new physiology emerges, based on a computational analysis of the language (the book is sold with a DVD containing the results), and, second, this analysis is placed in a classical historical perspective, offering some excellent chapters on the culture, medicine and philosophy of Bichat's epoch. The only drawback to this focus on linguistic analysis is that the complete conceptual explanation of Bichat's text is not given due consideration.