ABSTRACT
The medical profession was gradually shedding its former, mixed reputation and gathering prestige. A "belief in the art of healing as the foremost humanistic discipline" extended well beyond France, and this is understandable in the light of contemporary medical achievements. In France the key figure behind the excitement generated among the pioneers of alienism, and key to promoting this particular branch of medicine's new claims, was Philippe Pinel's friend and patron the ideologue George Cabanis. Cabanis's emphasis on the importance of human sensibility, as that through which intellectual processes come into being, led him to the concern with mind–body relations that was so intensely to preoccupy Pinel and his successors. The passions were the way out of Cabanis's psycho-physiological monism and materialism; they work "sympathetically" on the brain by way of the stomach and intestines. In a sense Pinel retraces his steps back to Locke, reinstating the importance of experience.
