ABSTRACT
Historians seeking the origins of vitalism have long been puzzled by the figure of Fran<;ois Boissier de Sauvages, who has been variously labeled an "animist," an "animo-vitalist," a "vitalist," and, most recently, a "Newtonian." Even the hagiographers of the Montpellier school have not known what to do with Sauvages: sometimes he appears as a precursor of vitalism, sometimes he is simply appropriated into the Montpellier tradition without reference to vitalism, sometimes he figures not at all. 1 That Sauvages was central to the emergence of vitalist thought in Montpellier is undeniable. All accounts of the Montpellier faculty in the 1730s agree that it was Sauvages who broke with the teachings of iatromechanists and iatrochemists and promoted a new doctrine indebted to the teachings of the controversial professor in Halle, Georg-Ernst Stahl. When Bordeu arrived on the scene in 1739 a cohort of "Stahl ian" students had formed round Sauvages. Furthermore, no other tenable link between the medical pedagogy offered in Montpellier in the early eighteenth century and vitalist discourse of the later eighteenth century has ever been suggested.2 Nonetheless, historians seeking to elucidate the influence of Sauvages have offered many conflicting opinions, as the labeling difficulties alluded to above suggest. Sauvages's medicine is not in fact easily classifiable. A blend of mechanist, animist, and vitalist elements, it was filled with unresolved tensions. The most singular feature of the historiography on Sauvages is perhaps that he appears in two differing contexts that are never related to one another. One of these is the transition from mechanism to animism in medical physiology; the other is the peculiarly eighteenthcentury effort to develop comprehensive classifications of disease - "nosologies" -that placed static disease-entities on what Foucault called the "grid" of natural history.-1 This chapter seeks to integrate these aspects of Sauvages's work and in so doing to clarify in what ways Sauvages was crucial to the formation of the physicians who became the architects of Montpellier vitalism. Sauvages was instrumental in the emergence of vitalism thanks both to his successes and to his failures. His attack on iatromechanism conveyed to his students an acute sense
of the highly variable character of vital phenomena. While Sauvages's theoretical discussions of problems in physiology and pathology pressed this attack, it was, paradoxically, the frustrations and ultimate failure of his own nosological project that best indicated the futility of seeking to capture the dynamic phenomena of life within a static taxonomic framework.
