The vitalism of the Montpellier school has long been associated with holism. Although this term came into wide use only in the twentieth century, it may be applied without excessive anachronism to the biomedical perspective vigorously promoted by Montpellier physicians of the mid-Enlightenment, roughly during the 1750s to the 1780s (Lawrence and Weisz 1988, 1-22, 71). The holistic perspective of Montpellier may be defined either negatively or positively. Viewed in negative terms it entailed the attacks Montpelliérains launched against iatromechanism, with its emphasis on individual body parts. Stated positively it involved the focus of Montpellier physicians on the functional unity of living organisms, in human beings the intimate relations inhering between the “physical and the moral.” Both approaches suggest that Montpellier's salient role in the history of biomedicine was established by its commitment to a holistic perspective that was evident not only in the handling of the classic subjects of medicine – physiology, pathology, and therapeutics – but also in its positioning of medicine within the social and cultural landscape of the later eighteenth century.Footnote ¹

Although in many respects the vitalist physicians of Montpellier formed a “theoretical school,” tensions and differences among the school's leading defenders may also be discerned; in respect to some key issues these divisions emerged with increasing clarity as the eighteenth century approached the great climacteric of the French Revolution. This paper is devoted to the work of a physician, J.-C.-M.-G. Grimaud (1750-Reference Grimaud1789), who, though by some indices a minor figure in the Montpellier school, produced work that formed an essential component of its legacy. Grimaud's only major work published in his lifetime was a two-part treatise on nutrition that he wrote in response to a prize question set by the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg (Grimaud Reference Grimaud1787, Reference Grimaud1789). Although this work did not gain the academic laurels its author had sought, it did command attention among physiologists thanks to Grimaud's attempt to grapple with problems – digestion, growth, the regeneration of bone and skin – that were regarded as exceptionally complex and obscure.Footnote ² Grimaud also exerted wide influence as a teacher at the University of Medicine of Montpellier. His lectures on physiology, in which he attempted to offer a comprehensive survey of the subject, were compiled and published posthumously under the title Cours complet de physiologie, and the same was true for his lectures on fevers (Grimaud Reference Grimaud and Dumas1791, Reference Grimaud and Demorcy-Delletre1815, Reference Grimaud1818, Reference Grimaud1824).

By these various means Grimaud's teaching became well known. Its most marked influence was registered by Xavier Bichat, and through him, by leading French physiologists of the nineteenth century. As Bichat himself acknowledged, it was from Grimaud that he drew certain essentials of his own doctrine of the “two lives,” the division between “interior” and “exterior” functions, which in time transmuted into the binary construct of the central versus the autonomic (vegetative) nervous system (Bichat Reference Bichat1809, 13; Rey Reference Rey2000, 360). As Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna have observed, Bichat's doctrine of the “two lives” became one of the foundations of physiology and remained so in France and elsewhere until well after the middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote ³ The subject of Grimaud's influence on Bichat, and in turn Bichat's influence on nineteenth-century physiology and medical science, is an important one. Nonetheless, in this paper I will focus not on the specifics of the Grimaud-Bichat connection but on what I see as Grimaud's break with the holistic spirit and tradition of Montpellier medicine. I will argue that Grimaud's doctrine of the “two lives” re-introduced into Montpellier vitalism a dualistic perspective that earlier Montpelliérains had struggled to overcome or, at the least, had bracketed as a “metaphysical” question not susceptible to scientific investigation. Leading physicians of the Montpellier school of the 1750s-1770s, including the two most celebrated figures, Théophile de Bordeu and Paul-Joseph Barthez, sought to establish the unitary character of the human subject with the help of diverse constructs, not all equally successful in application. Bordeu, although bent in key respects on elaborating a view of the separate “tastes,” “appetites,” or “lives,” of the individual organs, sought at the same time to demonstrate that health depended on the harmonious integration of organic action. He also placed great emphasis, increasingly so in his later years, on the unifying functions of the “mucus” or connective tissue (Bordeu 1818). Barthez, less skeptical of abstraction than Bordeu, famously brought all physiological activity under the sway of a unitary Vital Principle (Barthez Reference Barthez1778; Reich Reference Reich1995).

By contrast, Grimaud, who was frankly committed to exploring the “metaphysical” questions raised by medicine, embraced a dualistic perspective that divided the morphology and physiological activities of the thinking and acting human subject into sharp binaries. Generalizing from anatomical observations, he constructed dualist body topographies of left versus right and upper versus lower, while his physiology rested on dichotomies of “exterior” versus “interior,” “higher” versus “lower,” and “tonic” versus “digestive” functions and forces. Most significant, Grimaud forthrightly embraced a spiritualist doctrine of the division of soul and body. In explicating this perspective, Grimaud did not refer explicitly to tenets of Catholic or more broadly Christian theology; nor, despite his stated recognition of the importance of metaphysics, did he declare allegiance to any philosophical camp. Indeed on a number of occasions Grimaud stated his lack of interest in refining philosophical distinctions and terminology.Footnote ⁴ When he did directly address questions about the nature of matter, the soul, or the division between the living and the non-living, he averred that understanding of such problems had altered little since the days of the Ancients, when the two schools of “animists” and “atomists” had made their first appearance (Grimaud Reference Grimaud1787, 1:43–45 n.1). And although Grimaud did include Aristotle among the “theist philosophers” he admired, and credited him for illuminating the distinction between tonic and digestive force, he was at pains to attribute Ancient wisdom primarily to physicians. He hailed Hippocrates as the “founder of animism,” the first to attribute to “an intelligent principle” all those acts of the living body that fulfilled “determined ends,” and Galen as the author of the original and best statement of the doctrine of “pre-established harmony” (ibid., 1:14, 134 n.1, 145 n.1, 148-49 n.1, 176 n.1). Similarly with the Moderns, Grimaud avoided direct engagement with theologians and philosophers on the problem of the joining of body with mind or soul, calling instead upon medical figures, especially the animist theorist Georg-Ernst Stahl (“one of the most remarkable geniuses”), to illuminate the work of the soul in guiding specific physiological activities (ibid., 1:6; 1824, 1:29, 47, 62).Footnote ⁵

While it is difficult to discern with precision the origins of Grimaud's spiritualist and dualist constructs, it is clear that in crucial ways his thinking marked a departure from that of his Montpellier teachers. Grimaud's embrace of a dichotomous vision of the human subject was paradoxical: on occasion he deployed to good effect the metaphor of life as an unbroken “circle.” Nonetheless, I will argue, his doctrine of the “two lives” belied this image and undercut the holistic framework of Montpellier medicine. As it rested on a spiritualist foundation broadly rejected within biomedicine by the late eighteenth century, moreover, Grimaud's thinking opened Montpellier vitalism to charges of conservatism and obscurantism that continue to be lodged against it even in modern scholarship (Maulitz Reference Maulitz1987, 14).

Montpellier Vitalism and Holism

Montpellier vitalists asserted a holistic perspective both in critiques they developed of what they perceived as reigning iatromechanism, and in positive formulations they devised of the nature of life. The attack that Montpellier vitalists launched against iatromechanism is one of the best-documented features of their work and activity. Their criticisms were aimed at many targets – at Descartes as the philosophical architect of the body-machine analogy, at Herman Boerhaave as the physician most responsible for establishing mechanist thinking in medicine, and at Albrecht von Haller for his preoccupation with “the minutiae. . .of parts.” The underlying complaint of the Montpelliérains against mechanists concerned their effort to assimilate the living body to the realm of the non-living and to position living beings unproblematically within the domain of matter in movement. As they construed it, this way of conceiving the living body rendered life dependent on organization, structure, or a particular aggregation of parts, and neglected the role of an irreducible vital force or forces not anchored in specific material “apparatuses” (Rey Reference Rey2000, 94-103; Williams Reference Williams2003, 131, 152, 159-60, 262; Steinke Reference Steinke2005, 203–06).Footnote ⁶

Moving beyond this negative case against iatromechanism, Montpellier vitalists developed a holistic framework that rested on what Bordeu referred to, in his seminal work on the glands, as a “conserving force constantly on guard” against substances, activities, or bodily dispositions that threatened to undermine the health of the organism.Footnote ⁷ Bordeu seemed on occasion to equate vital activity with sensibility, the capacity of distinct body parts to feel sensations coming either from the exterior milieu in which the body functioned or from the organism's spontaneously “feeling” interior. Other Montpelliérains, especially Barthez, found Bordeu's emphasis on sensibility inadequate to explicate the multiple “conserving” activities of the living body and postulated instead the work of an over-arching, unitary Vital Principle in directing the responses and choices of the organism. Barthez's singular Vital Principle was deliberately crafted to dispel any ambiguity about the integral wholeness of the living organism as expressed in multiple and complex activities. Although determined to explicate functionally differentiated “forces,” “synergies,” and “sympathies” at work in the human organism, Barthez ultimately brought them all under the sway of the Vital Principle, whose essential nature he believed physicians could never know but whose effects were readily demonstrable from clinical observation, if appropriately pursued (Rey Reference Rey2000, 133-34; Reich Reference Reich1995, 289-98).Footnote ⁸

In drawing attention to the holism of Montpellier, I do not seek to obscure what are evident tensions in Montpellier thinking about whether vital activity should be assigned to one overriding vital force or principle, or, instead, distributed in multiple vital forces, functions, or properties. These tensions are evident within the larger Montpellier tradition that unfolded roughly between 1750 and 1850. They are also apparent in the thinking of individual physicians as they shifted observational and analytical contexts. Historians have drawn particular attention to the ambiguities that characterize Bordeu's statements on this matter – his assertion at once of a unifying “conserving force” and hence, presumably, of a unitary “life” of the organism – and his famous doctrine of the distinct “lives” manifest in the operation of individual organs. Bordeu employed a range of metaphors to convey what might be termed his “one life-many lives” conundrum. These include his famous construct of the particular “taste” (“goût”) of the individual gland, which guided the glandular organ in discriminating among, and thence admitting or rejecting, the humors appropriate to its peculiar form of secretion (Bordeu Reference Bordeu and Richerand1818a, 156-57, 163-64). Closely related was Bordeu's conception of the “department” of action of the gland or organ, a neighboring region in which a particular gland or organ exercised marked effect, either positive (stimulating) or negative (suppressing) the activity of associated parts. The “department,” in short, encompassed “everything that enters into a sort of action when the gland acts.”Footnote ⁹ Similarly, in respect to circulatory action Bordeu distinguished between what he called “general circulation” and “particular circulation,” the latter exercising peculiar effect within its defined “circle” but participating at the same time in the work of circulation as a whole (ibid., 187).

As Bordeu's references to autonomously functioning “tastes” and “departments” make clear, he attributed great significance to some kind of independent “life” at work in the various organs. But, as stressed earlier, he also strove constantly to reconcile and draw together these various lives: his famous metaphor of the organs functioning like bees in a hive, the organs/bees moving together in an instinctual, functionally purposive swarming activity, resonated powerfully with other evocations of cooperative animal life well known to his contemporaries.Footnote ¹⁰ Those historians who have sought in eighteenth-century physiology models of political authority have perceived in Bordeu's work a “federative” metaphor at odds with the centralization (brain-dominance) of the absolutist monarchy of the Ancien Régime (Bowling Reference Bowling1997). More important than all these considerations, as I see it, is the fact that as a physician Bordeu defined health itself as the coordinated, harmonious action of the disparate “lives” and that this clinical and therapeutic concern superseded any interest he had in the larger physiological (or metaphysical) problem of the essential nature of life.Footnote ¹¹

These features of Bordeu's work are, by now, fairly well known and understood by historians of Enlightenment physiology, even if there is still debate about the significance and ramifications of these tensions in his thinking. Less discussed is Bordeu's struggle to clarify the relation between the brain, commonly accorded by iatromechanists an overarching, guiding role in the exercise of many functions, and the organs in which he was inclined to see independent “lives.” This struggle is also apparent in Bordeu's treatise on the glands, in which he established four essential conditions for the work of glandular secretion. These included some kind of shaking, irritation, or friction (“les frottemens et les secousses de l'organe”); a proper arrangement of the excretory canals; a favorable disposition of the blood vessels; and, most important, the original “spasm” that set the whole process in motion. In this account Bordeu laid considerable stress on the role of the nerves in the spasm that activated the glandular body, and he also took up the role of the brain in initiating this phenomenon (Bordeu Reference Bordeu and Richerand1818a, 130). One of the goals he set himself was to undercut the longstanding doctrine of the “animal spirits,” according to which an ethereal fluid of some kind passed through the nervous vessels and in so doing activated or accomplished a great range of bodily functions. Informed by anatomical investigations of nervous structures that had shown the nerves to be solid tissue masses rather than the hollow tubes imagined by advocates of “animal spirits,” Bordeu argued that the nerves did their work not by conveying any fluid but, instead, by conveying “vibrations” created by the constant motion of the brain, itself the result of arterial pulsation (ibid., 82-92). This description gave primacy to the role of the brain in glandular secretion in a fashion that could, potentially, be extended to all involuntary and unconscious functions of the body, including those that were the work of all the organs classified as “glands” – kidney, pancreas, testicle, and others – by eighteenth-century anatomists.Footnote ¹² And yet this construct was at odds with the thinking of anatomists who attributed to the brain control only of those activities – feeling and movement – that were conscious and voluntary. In respect to this problem a key figure for Bordeu was Jacques Bénigne Winslow, one of a number of anatomists who regarded the ganglia stretched along the length of the “great sympathetic” nerve as so many “little brains” functioning more or less independently of the brain and spinal cord. In his treatise on the glands Bordeu himself used the term “little brains” and also referred not to the origin of the nerves in the brain but in the ganglia (ibid., 198). In this fashion Bordeu suggested something akin to what was to develop within neuroscience as a demarcation of the functions of two differentiated nervous systems. Nonetheless, the relation of the big brain to the little brains was not a central theme for Bordeu; he did not discuss the problem extensively nor seek in any sustained way to explicate the relative roles and actions of the two systems.

If in his treatise on the glands Bordeu held in tension models of brain-dominance and independent “lives,” in his later work he gave ever more credence to the latter construct. In works such as his treatise on chronic maladies, in which his focus was much more determinedly medical – clinical in method and therapeutic in intent – Bordeu emphasized the wisdom of the organs in accomplishing their tasks and in repairing defects and overcoming illness (Bordeu Reference Bordeu1818b, 797-930).Footnote ¹³ This wisdom was an essential element of Bordeu's expectancy, his faith in the healing power of nature. Similarly, insofar as Bordeu was able to reconcile his conception of the autonomous “lives” of the organs with a sense of the unity of the body, that unity rested not on the orchestration of physiological activity by the brain but on altogether different constructs, especially the connective tissue that was present throughout the body and that, as he sought to demonstrate, performed multiple functional roles. The doctrine of “sympathies,” too, functioned to unite the body in reciprocities, although this ancient construct figured less importantly in Bordeu's oeuvre than it did in the thinking of Barthez. It would take me too far afield to attempt to trace out the history, after Bordeu, of Montpellier thinking about the independent “lives” of the organs, but it is worth noting that Barthez too, although in the final analysis attributing all functional “decisions” to the work of a unitary Vital Principle, often spoke of the individual organs as if they enjoyed considerable independence of action.Footnote ¹⁴

The central tenets of Montpellier vitalism were established in a period, roughly the late 1740s to 1770s, and in an institutional context, Montpellier as a medical school and the city itself as a “medical town,” in which the human subject enjoyed primacy. Nonetheless, the same decades saw a wealth of inquiry that, in time, established the comparative perspective that deprived human beings of primacy and revolutionized the study of anatomy and physiology. At just the moment when Montpelliérains focused on medical physiology, Buffon pursued the wide-ranging labors that resulted in his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, a work that both synthesized and added in essential ways to naturalists’ knowledge of the animal and vegetable “realms” of nature (Roger Reference Roger, Bonnefoi and Pearce Williams1997). Grimaud was well aware of this work; indeed he was a particular admirer of Buffon, to whom he referred as “this man of genius who brings honor to all of France.”Footnote ¹⁵ Grimaud was also much interested in the study of plants and the attempt to discern which features of their vegetative life were shared with animals and human beings and which differed from those of “higher” beings, and how. Taking cognizance of the important results of investigations that extended beyond the human, Grimaud on a number of occasions insisted on the importance of the comparative method, lauding the Ancients, especially Aristotle, for initiating this approach, while also recognizing the valuable contributions of contemporaries.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed it was in meditating on the nature of vegetable “life” as explored by both Ancients and Moderns that Grimaud moved toward his understanding of the differences between the “two lives” at work in human physiology.

Grimaud's only major published treatise, the two-part memoir on nutrition, provides a succinct statement of his doctrine of the “two lives,” and historians have generally turned to that work to get a sense of his thinking.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet despite the greater sophistication of that discussion, Grimaud's Cours complet de physiologie, with its broader range and its explicitly pedagogical intent, provides in some respects a clearer view of the philosophical and ideological implications of the “two lives” doctrine.Footnote ¹⁸ This work opens by defining physiology as the science of the functions of the living body whose ultimate goal was to obtain knowledge of the “laws by which they are governed” (Grimaud Reference Grimaud1824, 1:1). Grimaud restated the frequently made Montpellier complaint that modern physiology had over-emphasized “the state of the cadaver and death” with results that were, inevitably, “sterile and petty” (ibid., 1:2). This topic took Grimaud to the issue of the utility of anatomy to the study of physiology, again a matter much discussed in earlier years by Montpelliérains, but one that he approached in unique fashion by differentiating between the value of anatomical investigation focused on the “exterior” or “interior parts” of the body. The differences between “exterior” and “interior” he initially set forth in these terms:

Given this essential difference of function, it was only the external parts, Grimaud insisted, that could profitably be subjected to investigation under the anatomist's knife.

Unlike the “external parts” that the anatomist could hope to know, and that indeed must be thoroughly known before any attempt was made to penetrate the body's inner recesses, “interior parts” were not susceptible to anatomical inquiry. Central to this viewpoint was Grimaud's conviction that the interior parts and functions of the body acted independently of “organization” or “structure.” While the physical arrangement of parts was essential to the work of the “life-principle” manifest in external functions, no such “necessity” was evident in the interior functions, “in relation to which organization is designed in a vaguer, freer, more uncertain manner” (ibid., 1:28). Exterior functions differed fundamentally from interior:

Structured parts or, as he frequently termed them, “material instruments,” could be mobilized, or not, in the performance of “interior functions,” as dictated by the different “forces inherent in each organ”; nothing, in their action, was dictated by physiological “necessity.” This spontaneity or independence of interior functions Grimaud explicated further by taking up the all-important issue of the sensibility of the different organs. Asserting as a fundamental principle the long-established Montpellier view that sensibility was not, contrary to the teaching of Haller and his followers, limited to nerves, Grimaud insisted that sensibility worked in different ways in all organs of the body (ibid., 2:170-71). Observing that nerves were, structurally, “homogeneous bodies,” Grimaud asked how they could be regarded as responsible for the “differently modified sensibility [at work] in each organ?” Students of physiology must accustom themselves, he continued, to “viewing each living part as penetrated by indeterminate forces, exclusive principles of the operations that they perform.”Footnote ²¹

As an admirer of Buffon, Grimaud was careful to note that he did not assert the existence of two differentiated classes of functions as “an absolute truth” but purely as “a simple hypothesis” that helped to establish order in the thinking of the observer. Nature, he insisted, is one, and the methods that naturalists use to divide and classify its products are purely “abstractions of the mind” (ibid., 1:39).Footnote ²² Thus Grimaud allowed that in nature it was only to be expected that some functions seemed to partake at one and the same time of the interior and the exterior (ibid., 1:40). Nonetheless, as he proceeded through his exposition it became evident that Grimaud was, in fact, offering a general reclassification of physiological functions. This division derived most importantly from the differences Grimaud perceived in the nature and operations of two varieties of vital force, the “tonic” and the “digestive.” Grimaud did not attempt to define the nature of these forces; rather he explained their importance by alluding to their involvement with specified body parts and functions. His discussions may be represented schematically as follows:

Grimaud frequently returned to this great division, taking one or another organ or activity as illustrative of the differentiated roles of tonic and digestive force, exterior and interior functions. The work of “exterior parts” was typified by the hand and the eye. The hand was an external part whose work depended on the number, structure, and organization of its bones; it acted in accordance with the mechanico-physical laws governing the movements of external objects that it grasped; it responded to the conscious, voluntary choices of the subject; and it was an apparatus of special, if not exclusive, importance in establishing the distinctiveness and superiority of human beings (animals have less effective hands, plants none) (ibid., 1:41–42). Similarly, the organization of the eye was determined by its subordination to the “laws of optics” that held sway in the world of material bodies. It enabled the seer not just to see but, deliberately, to look and inquire; it provided the material apparatus essential to the functioning of one of the higher senses – sight, hearing, touch – in contrast to the low senses – taste and smell – that were most highly developed among the animals (ibid., 1:46).

By contrast, interior functions – irritability, digestion, growth, heat, respiration – were unconstrained by structure, nervous or any other. Such functions – and here the irreplaceable value of comparative study became clear – unfolded within every living being, “whatever the prodigious variety of their structure” (ibid., 1:48). Independent of any particular “organic instruments,” they resulted, instead, from the exercise of a “digestive or alterative force” that worked on the “nutriments” (food, air) taken in from the exterior. Interior functions unfolded within every molecule of the body, thus differing essentially from the activities of the “aggregative masses” studied by anatomists (ibid., 1:48-49). Stating the matter more abstractly, Grimaud held that the “penetrative forces” that enabled the interior functions developed “in the totality of the mass” and were “spread and diffused throughout the whole habitus (habitude) of the organ, [thus] rendering them independent of the phenomena of organization and structure” (ibid., 1:184).Footnote ²⁴

Grimaud's theory of digestion, which in important respects resembled Bordeu's exposition of the working of the glands, exemplified with special clarity the dichotomy he perceived in the functioning of the “two lives.” Insisting on the complexities and obscurities surrounding the digestive process, Grimaud assailed the iatromechanist view that digestion resulted from simple mechanical actions of compression, smashing, and grinding, and urged, instead, that “true digestion” entailed a hidden process of transformation in which the digestive apparatus exercised discrete “appetites” in selecting and assimilating nutrients appropriate to the specific needs of the organism. Grimaud attributed no importance to the particular structure of the digestive organs, which, like all interior organs were soft, homogeneous, and “unformed.” Unlike the external organs, whose organization reflected their submission to mechanico-physical laws, the digestive apparatus did its work in ways that could not be attributed to the specific number, shape, or organization of its constituent parts. Like other activities dependent on “digestive force,” the process of digestion was not subject to direct observation. It could be known only through its effects, which counted among the most essential phenomena governed by the “conserving force” responsible for the general life of the organism. All such phenomena were, in essence, incomprehensible to the observer: unfolding deep within the interior of the body, entirely unconscious and involuntary, these processes were directed by and responsive only to the “interior sense” (ibid., 2:213-28).Footnote ²⁵

One Life or Two Lives?

There can be little question that Grimaud's “two lives” doctrine undercut the holistic tendencies of Montpellier tradition in essential ways. How it did so may be explored by focusing on three issues: first, Grimaud's doctrine of the soul and his reversion to a kind of animism long since discarded in Montpellier; next, his construction of a dichotomy between “higher” and “lower” physiological functions based on moral and aesthetic judgments (“shameful,” “disgusting”) largely absent from the work of his Montpellier predecessors; and, lastly, Grimaud's embrace of an explicitly spiritualist teleology that undercut earlier Montpellier conceptions of the self-equilibrating powers of a functionally integrated organism.

Although Grimaud lent the soul new prominence, the soul had by no means ever been entirely absent from Montpellier medicine and physiology. Contrary to what some historians have argued in respect to Bordeu, he does not, to my mind, belong in the company of Enlightenment materialists who saw the human organism as just another instance of “matter in motion.” Nor, I would urge, did any other Montpellier physician embrace such a view. What the Montpelliérains did do, embracing in limited fashion the secularizing tendencies of Enlightenment medicine, was to bracket the soul, seeking wherever possible explanations of life-activity that were independent of theological constructs. Nevertheless, in keeping with a respect for religious orthodoxy that befitted the social context in which they labored (especially their dependence on the favor of the Ancien Régime court), Montpellier physicians did reaffirm, when they felt called upon to do so, Christian doctrines of the creation of the soul by the deity, the soul's independence of action, and the unencumbered human capacity for the exercise of free will.Footnote ²⁶

In contrast to other Montpelliérains who expressed a kind of routine respect for religious principles without according the soul a governing role in the life of the organism, Grimaud restored the soul to a position of physiological guardianship not upheld in Montpellier since the work of the animist theoretician François Boissier de Sauvages (Williams Reference Williams2003, 80-111, esp. 95-101). While echoing on occasion Sauvages's lament for the soul's “confusion” in registering the experience of the body (“The soul sees, although often in confused fashion, all that the body experiences”), Grimaud rejected the speculations of materialist physicians that the soul could be radically disturbed by material conditions and influences.Footnote ²⁷ He heaped scorn, for example, on the view of some “Moderns” that the soul could be cast into a state of perpetual vertigo by the unceasing movements imparted to the brain by arterial pulsation: whatever the physical movements imparted to the brain and nerves as instruments of the soul, the soul presided over bodily decisions in accord with the “pre-established harmony” of soul and body that was the ultimate gift of the creator (Grimaud Reference Grimaud1824, 1:52, 2:140-41, 185–86). Referring in diverse contexts to the “wisdom,” “choices,” and “knowledge” evident in beneficent physiological activity, Grimaud often employed the term “soul,” using it essentially interchangeably with the expression “Vital Principle” favored by his teacher Barthez. In an interesting anticipation of the language of early nineteenth-century psychology, especially that of the academic tribune Victor Cousin, Grimaud also used the term “moi” to indicate the self that persisted despite the constant dissolution of the matter constituting the human organism:

In thus asserting the primacy of soul – and the persistence of the subject beyond the constant dissolution of mere matter – Grimaud reconfigured vitalist physiology as a science that simultaneously reaffirmed traditional spiritualist dualisms and opened the way to a more modern framing of the uniquely elevated character of the human self.Footnote ²⁹

Grimaud's dualism assumed a different form in his demarcation of the “higher” and “lower” functions constitutive of human physiology. As suggested earlier, Grimaud's “higher-lower” dichotomy presaged the division between the central and the “vegetative” nervous systems that would dominate Continental physiology into the later nineteenth century. Yet, paradoxically, the insights that led him to this distinction resulted from one of the procedures he employed to reaffirm a holistic view of the organism – life as a “circle” – to which, despite all his theoretical divagations, he perceived himself as somehow remaining true. This procedure entailed a persistent effort to discredit what he saw as the exaggeration by “materialist” physicians of the importance of the brain and the nerves connected directly to it. On the issue of the brain's role Grimaud took the lead of his Montpellier predecessors. Just as Montpelliérains had expressed steady opposition to over-estimations of the importance of William Harvey's doctrine of the “great circulation,” as they called it, they had assiduously combated views of the dominance of the brain and argued for its position as simply one organ among many. Grimaud's hostility to over-valuations of the brain's importance was linked to his privileging of the soul: he decried the view that any mere organ could be responsible, as “materialist” physicians asserted, for making the manifold choices required to assure the harmonious functioning of the human organism. But he also worked to reduce the brain's importance in keeping with his stated view of the oneness and integration of organic processes:

Against the view of Haller and his followers that all conscious and willed action of the body – feeling and movement – resulted from the work of the brain and its concomitant nervous structures, Grimaud insisted that all parts of the body felt and moved, whether supplied with nerves that took the brain's direction or not. This embrace of a general property of sensibility at work throughout the organism has long been recognized as a key element of Montpellier physiology. In the hands of Bordeu, it had worked to elevate the importance of obscure processes of corporal “choice” such as the decision of the glands to “admit” into their “sphere of action” and turn to discrete purposes particular bodily humors (Gross Reference Gross1979; Williams Reference Williams1994, 32-41).

In contrast to earlier Montpelliérains, Grimaud, while reaffirming that the work of interior organs represented a form of bodily wisdom, a capacity for making beneficent choices, nonetheless moved to differentiate radically between conscious and unconscious corporal activity. In so doing he denigrated unconscious activity and undermined the view defended by his predecessors of the organism as animated by ceaseless and functionally equivalent reciprocities. Athough Grimaud often presented the dichotomies constituting the “two lives” in neutral terms or in terms recognizing the beneficent character of all life-processes, he also frequently employed language that privileged the work of the “exterior organs” over the “interior” and that established the activities of the “exterior organs” as the foundation of what was distinctively human. In Grimaud's exposition the “higher” functions encompassed all those that connected human beings with their exterior environment and entailed what he called “vigorous” (and, not incidentally, male) action in the world.Footnote ³¹ The “lower” functions, animated by “digestive force,” were those that human beings shared with all other sentient beings in the universe down to the lowly zoophyte and indeed to the forms of plant-life that constituted a separate “realm” of nature.

On frequent occasion Grimaud made explicit this distinction between the noble (exterior) and the ignoble (interior): the supreme bodily instrument was the hand, Aristotle's “organ of organs,” which alone made possible our “perfectibility” by responding to the considered and willed decisions of mind and soul (Grimaud Reference Grimaud1824, 1:42). The hand – with its elegance, precision, and purposiveness – stood in stark contrast to the vile intestines, with their dark, slow, and obscure work that conferred benefit only in sub-serving the higher functions. Reprising a theme he found in Plato, Grimaud expressed grudging appreciation for the slowness of the digestive process: it was in the intervals between feeding, digestion, and evacuation that the soul could engage in the “sublime” functions to which it was destined.

In this fashion Grimaud helped to reduce the “interior organs” – the lowly gut, among others – to a subordinate status that its defenders still struggle to elevate.Footnote ³³

Both of these dualist maneuvers – Grimaud's privileging of the action of the soul and his demarcation of “higher” and “lower” functions” – accord, finally, with the explicitly spiritualist teleology that pervades his work and that stands in contrast to the tendency in earlier Montpellier physiology to attribute the balance and health of the body purely to the beneficent workings of nature. Montpellier physicians had long stood as special champions of the “healing power of nature,” a feature of the Montpellier tradition commonly traced to the legacy of Hippocrates. Although Grimaud too lavished praise on Hippocrates, he did so not to celebrate the power of nature's healing work but to contrast the insights of the Ancient “theists” – among whom he counted Hippocrates (ibid., 1:23, 221) – to the errors of modern materialists who refused to recognize that the beneficence of nature was the result of the generosity and goodness of the Creator:

Just as Grimaud's affirmation of the soul as the guide of the organism reverted to an animistic viewpoint that his vitalist predecessors had sought to overcome, this attribution of corporal wisdom to the beneficence of the Creator broke with Montpellier teaching that health derived from the natural equilibration of functions assured by the actions of vital force. Arguing in this fashion, Grimaud undercut the view that it was the unceasing reciprocity of action among the body's vital centers that, in itself, accounted for the organism's persistence in the face of the destructive processes that worked to undermine it. Even if the “specific forces” of the organs, as he termed them (ibid., 1:11), functioned as effective instruments in the conservation of the organism, they no longer, in his construction, functioned as an immanent principle of vitality but, rather, expressed the will and decisions of a force outside, that of the Creator himself. Despite his self-proclaimed readiness to incorporate “metaphysical” questions into medicine, Grimaud never directly approached the question of how the Creator went about the work of “ordering and regulating” the multitude of life-processes required to preserve the living beings he had formed. On occasion he spoke in Leibnizian terms of the “pre-established harmony” of soul and body. At other times his language seemed to bespeak direct governance of life-processes by the deity, especially of those activities of the “digestive or alterative force” that were completely closed off from human observation and that lay beyond human comprehension. In either case, he shifted away from the conception upheld by his predecessors in Montpellier of a functionally integrated organism that, thanks to its inherent make-up, exercised the self-equilibrating capacities that assured its vitality.