Vincenzo Malacarne, professor of medicine, surgery, and obstetrics in Turin, Pavia, and Padua, Italy, represented a perfect example of an eighteenth century "letterato", combining interests in humanities, sciences, and politics, embodying the ideal of an encyclopedic and universal culture. He made important contributions in anatomy and surgery, teratology, obstetrics, neurology, and history of medicine, adopting a interdisciplinary approach based on the correlation between anatomy, surgery, and clinics. He deserves a special place in the history of neurology because of the first complete description of the human cerebellum. He quantified the units of the cerebellar internal structures, the lamellae being numbered for a systematic description of the human cerebellum. He thought the mental faculties depended on their number, considering a relation between the number of cerebellar lamellae and the expression of intellectual faculties. In this way, he made first statistics on human faculties. He advanced the concept that the number of cerebellar folia was influenced by the environment, thus providing the first nature-nurture hypothesis made on the basis of observations, and the concept of neuroplasticity in the scientific literature. Finally, he also contributed to the emergence of a new science, namely electrophysiology, because he laid down experimental foundations of a project on the recording of brain electricity, comparing the structure of the human brain with Volta's galvanic pillar.
Since his first years at Turin until the last years of his life at Padua, Vincenzo Malacarne devoted most of his time to the examination of the structures and the various parts of which the cerebellum and the human brain are composed. He is rightly considered as one of the first to have correctly described the anatomy of the cerebellum, as well in the field of human anatomy and comparative anatomy. However, his work cannot be reduced to these studies. He worked out a cerebral physiology, with organic and intellectual phenomena in mind, established on an anatomopsychic parallelism. This parallelism is itself founded on a rational and mathematical criterion: the number of lamellae contained in the cerebellum. A letter written by him in 1792 and addressed to Abbot Denina was recently found by the present author in November 2005 at the Academy of Sciences of Turin. Malacarne exposed his project of studying the animal electricity put forward by Galvani within the cerebral organ. May it be that Malacarne had in mind the physiology of his time while trying to record an electric activity within the brain? To cite this article: C. Cherici, C. R. Biologies 329 (2006).
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C’est durant le xix e siècle que l’épilepsie est dissociée de la catégorie des maladies mentales pour devenir un processus pathologique du système nerveux central. À partir de l’analyse croisée des travaux de Jackson sur l’épilepsie partielle et des observations de Charcot sur l’hystéro-épilepsie, il est possible de mettre en relief la façon dont les domaines de la psychologie et de la neurologie se sont délimités l’un par rapport à l’autre. Les influences croisées de Charcot et de John Hughlings Jackson ont notamment permis l’identification de l’épilepsie dite Bravais-Jacksonienne , appelée ainsi à partir de 1894. De l’œuvre de Jackson au néo-jacksonisme de Henry Ey, nous allons étudier ce mouvement historique durant lequel l’épilepsie, entre principe de dissolution et idées darwiniennes, est devenue plurielle, multiforme et localisée.
À partir de 1746, se développe un savoir de l’électricité, tant au niveau de ses lois que de ses applications, sur les corps organisés, parmi lesquels le corps humain est classé conducteur en 1729. Entre 1752 et 1791, les applications thérapeutiques de l’électricité se déplacent d’une part, du champ de la physique vers une médecine exploratoire ; d’autre part, de ses tentatives pour soigner la paralysie vers la prise en charge des troubles nerveux et mentaux. Si les neurosciences désignent les explorations du système nerveux, tant du point de vue de sa structure que de son fonctionnement, il semble bien qu’on puisse identifier une telle rupture épistémologique, au niveau des techniques et de la double poussée philosophique, matérialiste et vitaliste, au cœur des explorations électrophysiologiques du cerveau humain, à la fin du xviii e siècle. C’est en tout cas cette hypothèse que nous allons questionner dans le présent article. 1
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