OUR JOURNAL COVER NOSSA CAPA
During the apogee of so-called Enlightenment medicine, or the Age of Reason, physicians were tempted to create philosophical-medical systems to classify diseases and their cure according to rational guidelines.
Proposed by Bavarian chemist and physician Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) under the name of "animism", the theory based itself on the premise that life is the activity of soul (anima) and sickness, the consequence of the bad direction of soul. A pathologic condition was tonus or plethora, for what he prescribed copious bleeding and balsamic pills to stimulate the curative moving of anima; he also believed in secret remedies that had beneficial effects by means of suggestion.
A rival animist, the Prussian Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742), described the vital beginning as ethereal, communicated to fibers via nerves; sickness was the result of an alteration in its nature; acute maladies were spasmodic; chronic ones, atonic; they could be treated with sedative or stimulant medications.
An illustrious defender of vitalism in France was Théophile de Bordeu (1722-1776), who theorized that each organ contributes to blood with a mysterious substance, and that blood integration depends on those secretions, a theory that put him singularly close to endocrinology.
A brilliant vitalist from the Edinburgh School was William Cullen (1710-1790), who described the property of life as due to a nervous fluid that determined the tonus of solid corporeal parts. Modifications in this tonus caused spasms or atony, and thus, disease.
The most sensational system was invention of John Brown (1735-1788), a Scottish vicar who became a physician. He defended that lifes property was its excitability and diseases were sthenic or asthenic, according to the excitation degree. So, the treatment was stimulant, with alcohol or sedative, with laudanum. His system caused furor in Italy, provoked clamors in German universities, and was adopted by Benjamin Rush, in Philadelphia. As history tells, the therapy caused more deaths than the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
14 Sept 2007 -
Date of issue
June 2007
