Turgeon Y, Whitaker H A
Université du Québec a Montréal.
Brain Cogn. 2000 Jun-Aug;43(1-3):412-7.
The nineteenth century witnessed many advances in neuroscientific concepts. Among the notable are Charles Bell's (1774-1842) and François Magendie's (1783-1855) identification of sensory and motor pathways, Thomas Henry Huxley's (1825-1895) elaboration of evolutionary theory in the context of comparative neuroanatomy, and Emile Du Bois-Reymond's (1818-1896) and Hermann von Helmholtz's (1821-1894) work in experimental neurophysiology and on the concept of nervous energy. In Germany, the idea that the nervous system consisted of two elements, one that generated nervous energy and another that conducted it throughout the body, had wide currency in mid-nineteenth century. In France, Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808), physician, philosopher, and one of the founders of modern psychophysiology, argued that the brain is the part of the body in which electricity is stored. In his Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme, published between 1796 and 1802 (translated into German under the title Verhältnis der Seele zum Körper (1808)), Cabanis proposed new ideas on brain function, on the brain's own sensibility, on the concept of will, and on the chemical basis of nervous activity. In the Rapports Cabanis proposed a theory of how brain and nerves relate to thought and behavior. Foreshadowing later developments in neuropsychology, he suggested that different parts of the nervous system have separate functions. Despite the fact that Cabanis had many interesting ideas about brain function, he has been largely ignored by historians of neuroscience; e. g., he is mentioned briefly in Clark and Jacyna (1989), in only two footnotes in Neuburger (1897/1981), and not at all in Finger (1994). Cabanis's far-reaching theory of how the brain works helped shape understanding of the general notion of nervous energy in nineteenth-century European neuroscience.
19世纪见证了神经科学概念的诸多进展。其中值得注意的有查尔斯·贝尔（1774 - 1842）和弗朗索瓦·马让迪（1783 - 1855）对感觉和运动通路的识别，托马斯·亨利·赫胥黎（1825 - 1895）在比较神经解剖学背景下对进化理论的阐述，以及埃米尔·杜布瓦 - 雷蒙德（1818 - 1896）和赫尔曼·冯·亥姆霍兹（1821 - 1894）在实验神经生理学及神经能量概念方面的工作。在德国，19世纪中叶广泛流行着这样一种观点，即神经系统由两种元素组成，一种产生神经能量，另一种将其传导至全身。在法国，皮埃尔·让·乔治·卡巴尼斯（1757 - 1808），医生、哲学家，现代心理生理学的创始人之一，认为大脑是身体中储存电的部位。在他于1796年至1802年间出版的《论人类身体与精神的关系》（1808年以德文《灵魂与身体的关系》为题翻译出版）中，卡巴尼斯提出了关于脑功能、大脑自身的感觉、意志概念以及神经活动化学基础的新观点。在《论人类身体与精神的关系》中，卡巴尼斯提出了一种关于大脑和神经如何与思想及行为相关的理论。预示着神经心理学后来的发展，他认为神经系统的不同部分具有各自独立的功能。尽管卡巴尼斯关于脑功能有许多有趣的观点，但神经科学史学家在很大程度上忽略了他；例如，他在克拉克和亚西纳（1989年）中被简要提及，在诺伊布格（1897/1981年）中仅在两个脚注中被提及，而在芬格（1994年）中则完全未被提及。卡巴尼斯关于大脑如何工作的影响深远的理论，有助于塑造19世纪欧洲神经科学中对神经能量一般概念的理解。
