In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Le "Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort" di François Xavier Bichat. Un lessico fisiologico
  • Giuliano Pancaldi
Lucia di Palo . Le "Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort" di François Xavier Bichat. Un lessico fisiologico. Collana di storia della scienza. Bari, Italy: Cacucci Editore, 2005. 224 pp. Ill. €25.00 (paperbound + CD-ROM, 88-8422-398-9).

When analyzing scientific texts, historians of medicine and historians of science have rarely availed themselves of the tools provided by computational linguistics. The present book is a welcome exception. It comes from a series edited by Mauro Di Giandomenico at the University of Bari, which was inaugurated a few years ago with a brilliant contribution to the same little-explored field of study: the monograph Jean Martin Charcot e la lingua della neurologia by Liborio Dibattista.1 Dibattista and Lucia di Palo are also at the University of Bari.

The main goal pursued by di Palo is an analysis of Bichat's classic Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1802), based on computational linguistics. She seeks to address two main, related questions (p. 85). First: How were the renewal and the autonomy of physiology from other branches of science, advocated by Bichat, substantiated in the vocabulary he used in the Recherches? And second: Did his efforts aimed at establishing a special language for physiology succeed? The discussion of the technical and interpretive issues at stake occupy about two thirds of the book, the rest being devoted to a biographical profile of Bichat based on secondary literature.

The main software used by di Palo was INTEX, originally developed by Max Silberztein, a linguistic development environment including dictionaries and grammars that are applied to texts in order to locate morphological, lexical, and syntactic patterns, as well as to remove ambiguities and to tag simple and compound words. Di Palo combined INTEX with T-Lab, a software developed by Franco Lancia offering a set of additional tools for extracting, comparing, and mapping content. When applied to Bichat's text, these tools call the historian's attention to some obvious, as well as some less-obvious, and intriguing data. A (relatively) simple frequency analysis, for example (pp. 89–90), reveals that Bichat's most often used noun in the Recherches was sang (blood, 599 occurrences), followed by organes/organe (organs/organ), followed at some distance by vie (life) and cerveau (brain), followed at more distance by coeur (heart), fonctions/fonction (functions), mort (death), and poumon (lung, 228 occurrences). If you wonder what happened in the Recherches to Bichat's best-known notions of membrane and tissue—to which his interpreters have more often called attention—the CD-ROM accompanying di Palo's book will tell you at a glance that the two corresponding nouns come much lower in the frequency list, with tissu at 46 occurrences and membrane at 35.

Shifting to a more sophisticated exercise, in part 2 di Palo applies computational tools to an analysis of the arguments deployed by Bichat to convey his notion of experimental physiology. In this context, frequency lists (p. 152) tell that the accounts of Bichat's experiments found their place overwhelmingly in [End Page 454] the Recherches sur la mort, rather than in the Recherches sur la vie. Proximity searches help to detect the patterns of the arguments developed by Bichat to describe his experiments (pp. 139–68), and to expose the uncertainties affecting some of his beloved theoretical distinctions, like the one between sensibilité and contractilité (p. 115). Part 3, finally, contains an assessment of the impact of Bichat's language on the works of his contemporaries Anthelme Richerand and F.-R. Buisson, also based on the techniques of computational linguistics.

In the end, to answer the questions that di Palo set out to address, computational tools show that Bichat could not really claim to have introduced an entirely new language for physiology. According to di Palo, however, those same tools reveal that, especially in the Recherches sur la mort, Bichat did develop arguments that marked a new territory for experimental physiology, and a substantial departure from the tradition of vitalism in which he had been brought up.

Giuliano Pancaldi...

pdf

Share