ABSTRACT
In the last third of the eighteenth century, models of living beings as self-active agents begun to play a central role in French and German comparative anatomy, physiology and medicine. The models were based on the systemic order of interrelated parts within individual bodies that interacted again with the world that surrounded them. The chapter examines three variations of this model in the works of Georges Cuvier, Christoph Hufeland and Georges Cabanis. They all explained the conditions of existence of living beings through their inside–outside relations. Cuvier focussed on the inside–outside relations of systemic orders of correlated and subordinated parts, Hufeland on reproductive processes and cycles of destruction and production that depended on the exchange of inner and outer particles, and Cabanis on complex networks of organic units with specific stimuli–reaction schemes that mediated between inner and outer worlds.
