Physiological Researches on Life and Death

by Xavier Bichat

The very language of the vulgar, at a time when the learned referred to the brain, as the seat of the soul, affections of all kinds, distinguished the respective attributes of the two lives. We have always said a strong head, a head well organized to denote perfection of mind; a good heart, a sensible heart, to indicate proper feeling. The expressions of fury circulating in the veins, and stirring up the bile; of joy making the heart leap, of jealousy distilling its passions into the heart, are by no means poetical expressions, but the enunciation of that which actually takes place in nature. In this way do all these expressions, the language of the internal functions enter into our poetry, which in consequence is the language of the passions or the organic life, as ordinary speech, is that of the understanding or the animal life. Declamation holds a middle place between the two, and animates the cold language of the brain by the expressive language of the inward organs.

I shall even venture to assert that anger and love inoculate, if I may so express myself, into the humours, into the saliva particularly, a radical vice, which renders dangerous the bite of animals at such times; for these passions do really distil into the fluids a poison, as we indicate the fact by our common expressions. The violent passions of the nurse have frequently given her milk a pernicious quality, from whence disease has followed to the child; and in the same way shall we explain from the modifications which the blood of the mother receives under strong emotion, the manner, in which these emotions operate on the nutrition, the conformation, and even on the life of the fœtus. And not only do the passions essentially influence the organic functions, in affecting their respective viscera, but the state of these viscera, their lesions, the variation of their forces concur in a decided way to the production of the passions themselves. Their relations with age and temperament, establish incontestably this fact.

Who does not know for instance, that the individual of the sanguine temperament, whose expansion of lungs is great, whose circulatory system is large and strong; who does not know that such a man is possessed of a disposition to anger and violence? that when the bilious system prevails, the passions of envy and hatred are more particularly developed? that when the lymphatic system is pronounced, are pronounced also the inactivity and dulness of the individual?

In general that which characterises any particular temperament, consists in a correspondent modification on one hand of the passions, and on the other of the state of the organic viscera. The animal life is almost always a stranger to the attributes of the temperaments.

The same may be said of age; the weakness of the organization of the child coincides with his timidity. The development of the pulmonary and vascular system, with the courage and temerity of the youth; that of the liver, and the gastric system with the envy, ambition and intrigue of manhood.

In considering the passions as affected by climate and season, the same relations are observed between them and the organic functions; but physicians have sufficiently noticed these analogies, and it would be useless to repeat them.

At present, if from man in a state of health, we look to man in a state of disease, we shall see that the lesions of the liver, of the stomach, of the spleen, the intestines and heart produce a variety of alterations in our affections, which all of them cease together with their causes.

The ancients, better than our modern mechanicians, then were acquainted with the laws of the economy, in supposing that our bad affections were evacuated by purgatives, together with the noxious humours of the body. By disembarrassing the primæ viæ they got rid of these affections. In fact how dark a tint does the fulness of the gastric viscera cast upon the countenance! the errors of the first physicians on the subject of the atrabilis, were a proof of the precision of their observations on the connexion of these organs with the state of the mind.

In this way every thing tends to prove, that the organic life, is the term, in which the passions end, and the centre from whence they originate. But we shall be asked perhaps, why vegetables, which live organically, do not offer any vestige of them? the reason seems to be, that besides their want of the natural excitants of the passions, namely the external apparatus of the senses, they are wanting also in those internal organs, which concur most especially to their production, such as the digestive system, that of the general circulation, and that of the great secretions, which are remarked in animals.

Such are the reasons also why the passions are so obscure in the Zoophytes, in worms, &c. and why in proportion as the organic life becomes more simple in the series of animals, and loses its important viscera, the passions are less observable.