Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808): an early nineteenth century source for the concept of nervous energy in European behavioral neurosciences

Abstract

The nineteenth century witnessed many advances in neuroscientific concepts. Among the notable are Charles Bell's (1774-1842) and François Magendie's (1783-1855) identification of sensory and motor pathways, Thomas Henry Huxley's (1825-1895) elaboration of evolutionary theory in the context of comparative neuroanatomy, and Emile Du Bois-Reymond's (1818-1896) and Hermann von Helmholtz's (1821-1894) work in experimental neurophysiology and on the concept of nervous energy. In Germany, the idea that the nervous system consisted of two elements, one that generated nervous energy and another that conducted it throughout the body, had wide currency in mid-nineteenth century. In France, Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808), physician, philosopher, and one of the founders of modern psychophysiology, argued that the brain is the part of the body in which electricity is stored. In his Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme, published between 1796 and 1802 (translated into German under the title Verhältnis der Seele zum Körper (1808)), Cabanis proposed new ideas on brain function, on the brain's own sensibility, on the concept of will, and on the chemical basis of nervous activity. In the Rapports Cabanis proposed a theory of how brain and nerves relate to thought and behavior. Foreshadowing later developments in neuropsychology, he suggested that different parts of the nervous system have separate functions. Despite the fact that Cabanis had many interesting ideas about brain function, he has been largely ignored by historians of neuroscience; e. g., he is mentioned briefly in Clark and Jacyna (1989), in only two footnotes in Neuburger (1897/1981), and not at all in Finger (1994). Cabanis's far-reaching theory of how the brain works helped shape understanding of the general notion of nervous energy in nineteenth-century European neuroscience.