medical circles. A man of profound erudition, a collaborates with d'Alembert in the Encyclopædia, he exercised quite a preponderant influence on the medicine of his day. Stationed at Paris during part of his career, physician to the King and the Duke of Orleans, we may say that he supported his theories by every imaginable influence which might contribute to their success. In consequence of this, the medical schools taught that vital phenomena are the immediate effects of a force which has no analogues outside the living body. This conception reigned unchallenged up to the days of Bichat.
After Bichat, the vitalism of Barthez, more or less modified by the ideas of the celebrated anatomist, continued to hold its own in all the schools of Europe until about the middle of the nineteenth century. Johannes Müller, the founder of physiology in Germany, admitted, about 1833, the existence of a unique vital force "aware of all the secrets of the forces of physics and chemistry, but continually in conflict with them, as the supreme cause and regulator of all phenomena." When death came, this principle disappeared and left no trace behind. One of the founders of biological chemistry, Justus Liebig, who died in 1873, shared these ideas. The celebrated botanist, Candolle, who lived up to 1893, taught at the beginning of his career that the vital force was one of the four forces ruling in nature, the other three being—attraction, affinity, and intellectual force. Flourens, in France, made the vital principle one of the five properties of forces residing in the nervous system. Another contemporary, Dressel, in 1883, endeavoured to bring back into fashion this rather primitive, monistic, and efficient vitalism.
