Francois Magendie, a French physiologist, born in Bordeaux, Oct. 15, 1783, died in Paris, Oct. 8, 1855. He removed at an early age to Paris, where he graduated in medicine in 1803. He subsequently gave several courses of instruction in operative surgery at the ecole prac-tique, and has even left a special method of procedure for the resection of the lower jaw. But he soon devoted himself to the practical study of physiology, and published from 1809 to 1816 a considerable number of memoirs. He was appointed physician to the Hotel-Dieu, became a member of the academy of sciences, and in 1831 was appointed professor of medicine in the college de France. It was in this post, which he held for the remainder of his life, that Magendie developed the remarkable talent which distinguished him as a physiological investigator, and exerted so powerful an influence upon physiology and medicine in general, that he may almost be said to have inaugurated and established a new epoch in medical science. Before his time experimenters had been rare, and experiment had been employed, as a rule, in a subordinate manner, and was often regarded as secondary in value to systematic views and the supposed laws of vitality.

Magendie, however, insisted that experimentation was the only source of knowledge, and that the brilliant results of scientific generalization were nothing more than empty names, entirely destitute of value. Secondly, he abandoned the consideration of the so-called "vital properties" of the living tissues, introduced by Bichat, which had then become refined and multiplied to an excessive degree, and directed his investigations to the phenomena of a physical and chemical nature manifested by the animal organism, and which could be distinctly perceived and appreciated by the experimenter. In the third place, he experimented constantly upon living animals, for the reason that, the visible phenomena of the living body being the objects of his investigation, this was the only method by which he could hope to learn their real nature. He accordingly had an aversion for systematic scientific doctrines, and considered them as serving only to mislead the mind, and to substitute an intellectual uncertainty for the simple results of direct experimentation.

He therefore made the chair of medicine in the college de France a chair of experimental physiology, without attempting to construct or teach any complete system of physiological doctrine, unless it were that of a rigid and exclusive dependence upon the direct results of experiment. In 1822 he demonstrated the two different properties and functions of the anterior and posterior roots of the spinal nerves. In the previous year he founded the Journal de Physiologie experimentale et pathologique, which he continued to publish for ten years, and to which many of his valuable memoirs were communicated. His most important works are: Memoire sur le vomissement (Paris, 1813); Me-moire sur l'usage de l'epiglotte dans la deglutition (1813); Memoire sur les proprietes nutritives des substances qui ne contiennent pas d'azote (1816); Precis elementaire de physiologie (1816 - '17); Memoire sur les organes de l'absorption chez les mammiferes (Journal de Physiologie, 1821); Experiences sur les fonctions des racines des nerfs rachidiens (ibid., 1822); Memoire sur quelques documents recents rela-tifs aux fonctions du systeme nerveux (1823); Anatomie des systemes nerveux des animaux d vertebres (1825); Memoire physiologique sur le cerveau (1828); Memoire sur le mecanisme de l'absorption chez les animaux d sang rouge et chaud (Journal de Physiologie, 1828); Lecons sur les phenomenes physiques de la me (4 vols., 1836-'42); Lecons sur les fonctions et les maladies du systeme nerveux (2 vols., 1839); and Recherches physiologiques et cliniques sur le liquide cephalo-rachidien (1842).