From what we read, says C., "Comte attributed to what he calls the" principle of Broussais' a universal phenomenon in the field of biological, psychological and sociological "(1943/1966, trad.it. 1998, p. 23).
learn from the pages of The Normal and the Pathological (cf. ibid, p. 29-33) that the doctor and physiologist François Joseph Victor Broussais (1772-1838) provides a distinction in purely quantitative terms (in De l'irritation et de la folie 1828, but also in the Traité de physiologie appliquée à la Pathologie of 1822-23 or in the Catechism physiologique de Medicina of 1824), in the study of symptoms of diseases and health conditions in humans, including the normal or physiological and the condition known as pathological. In the search for the causes irritation of the tissues, dysfunctions that are found in the lungs lead to such a finding, according Broussais, surpasses the mind of a defect or an excess: when the air inside the lungs is too small in size, that is when the air is too little, you have a case of asphyxiation, which is the obvious example of irritation, when the air inside the lungs is too much or too much oxygen we are dealing with inflammation. It is clear that the two polarities excess-defect Broussais will be recognized by a normal operation that will identify the "regular" organ or tissue. The normal state would be allowed by the 'excitement', that is, from the constant omnilaterale agents outside the body (the components of the environment, such as air) together with the action of the internal organs: this combination of inside and outside to keep alive the living being. The mere "excitement" matches well, for Broussais, with the normal, but when this excitement, therefore resulting from the action of internal and external factors, is at fault (irritation) or excess (inflammation), the next state pathological. This is the 'rule of Broussais.
In this way, do you know C. Ideology and rationality in the history of life sciences (see 1977/1988, trans. com. 1992, pp. 54-56), the future transition from state normal, an organ or a tissue, the pathological condition becomes a scientifically measurable process that can be controlled and brought back to normal conditions through remedies such as bleeding or the application of leeches: what has historically happened in France between 1820 and 1832, year of an epidemic of cholera which killed, passed in vain to this care, showed the inconsistency of the theories of Broussais. He was thought that all dysfunction in tissues were solely attributable to inflammation or irritation, making no distinction, for example, between chronic gastritis and pneumonia. Every phenomenon of inflammation was well treated by the depletion or removal considered in excess of body fluids, which explains the fact that, in 1820, the French import about a million leeches from across Europe and more than thirty million in 1827.
It should be noted, moreover, says C. in The Normal and the Pathological (see 1943/1966, trans. com. 1998, pp. 33-39), that the origin of this quantitative way of understanding the disease dates back to Broussais, but the Scottish physician John Brown ( 1735-1788) and after him the French Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771-1802). For Brown, "life is maintained only by virtue of a particular property, the incitabilità, which allows the living to suffer disease and react. The diseases are not just a quantitative change [...] Of this property, according to an instruction that is too intense or too weak "(ibid., p. 33). The therapeutic procedure consists, according to Brown, back in the pathological state to its normal stage (since the gap that separates the two is only quantitative in nature) and intervene by administering agents that lower or raise the level of incitement diseased tissue: the purge, cold, diet, etc.. Similarly, Bichat, in Recherches sur la vie et la mort (1800), postulates the existence of a natural state in living bodies, bearing in mind that consists in altering the pathological phenomena, the increase or decrease in this state. So Brown, Bichat and Broussais theorize the absolute contiguity between the physiological and pathological state, does not differ anything else, the latter, and intensity.
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