[Melancholy between brain and circumstances: Cabanis and the new science of man]

Abstract

The period under study ends with the publication of a major work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, in which Cabanis defends the radical thesis of the identity of the physical and the moral. Amongst all the illnesses studied in this work, he accords particular importance to melancholy as it provides the best way of observing the "physical artifice of thought". Cabanis's rereading of the theses of classical medicine, which is here based on certain carefully chosen studies of the anatomists of his time, enables him to understand melancholy as both a moral affection (great sadness, exalted imagination) and a physical malfunction affecting the organs (namely the brain and the lower abdomen). He is thus able to demonstrate that it can be cured.