Anthropology and the Rise of Psychiatry from the ‘Encyclopédie’ to the Alienists

Physiologists in the eighteenth century often made use of the phrase économie animale or “animal economy.” This came to denote a very precise scheme in the vitalistic context, widely spread by the vitalist physicians of the Encyclopédie—among them, Ménuret de Chambaud (1733–1815), Henri Fouquet (1727–1806), and the Chevalier de Jaucourt (1704–79). This scheme supplanted both the old vision of the living creature as composed of a body and a soul—and the Hippocratic humoristic tradition of the soul-body unity in medicine. It yielded a structured research program, based on an anthropological view of man in his milieu, and led to a new conception of mental illness. The first psychiatrists, or “alienists,” Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) and Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840), were well aware of animal economy, which to some extent enabled them to conceive madness as an illness, characterized by a specific etiology and a specific cure, called moral treatment (traitement moral).