Gratiolet, Louis Pierre

(b. Ste. Foy-la-Grande, Gironde, France, 6 July 1815; d. Paris, France, 16 February 1865)

anatomy, anthropology.

Gratiolet was the son of a rural physician; his mother was of noble lineage. The father’s royalist allegiance disturbed his practice and led to removal to Bordeaux. Here Gratiolet began his studies. Soon turning to Paris, he completed his secondary course at the Collège Stanislas and began, probably in 1834, formal preparation in medicine. While he quickly exhibited uncommon skill and interest in anatomy, he was also successful in the various academic competitions which spurred on the aspiring practical physician (he held internships at the Pitié and Salpetrière hospitals).

Adjacent to the Salpetrière was the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, an active center for anatomical studies. Gratiolet frequented the dissection halls of the museum and soon (1839) became a participant in Henri de Blainville’s researches. By 1842, having been made Blainville’s laboratory assistant, he had renounced practical medicine for a career in science. He nonetheless completed all requirements for a medical degree (1845).

Such auspicious beginnings merely introduced twenty years of acute professional frustration. Gratiolet lectured on anatomy at the museum as Blainville’s deputy from 1844 until the latter’s death in 1850. Gratiolet’s candidacy for his teacher’s chair was rejected. He did continue as laboratory assistant and in 1853 was placed in charge of anatomical studies at the museum. He lacked, however, the professional chair which his scientific achievement and demonstrated instructional capacity deserved. Finally, in 1862, he was named deputy to the professor of zoology in the Faculty of Science, Paris, and received full rights to that chair at the close of 1863. Within sixteen months Gratiolet was dead of apoplexy. He had, reported Paul Broca, “lived only for science.”

Gratiolet was an indefatigable investigator and adroit interpreter of animal structure and function. In the former capacity he excelled as a descriptive anatomist, dealing with some of the most difficult material which the organism can present: the vascular and nervous systems, with emphasis on the brain and cranium. Like Blainville, he studied mollusks and concentrated above all on man and the primates. He offered detailed descriptions of the vascular system of such disparate creatures as the hippopotamus and the physician’s leech, molluscan organs of generation and generative products, and the osteology of mammals. Gratiolet was a descriptive and comparative anatomist and neither employed vivisection nor attended to pathological lesions and their putative functional correlates. So restricted an approach evoked criticism and should have imposed limits on the scope of the physiological inferences which he evidently conceived to be the primary impulse of his many inquiries. He was a pioneer in the use of embryological material for establishing general zoological affinities (and dissimilarities) and the assessment of the active roles of various structures.

Gratiolet’s interpretation of life and particularly of the nature of man began with principles enunciated by Blainville. The organism was an integral whole ceaselessly coping with ever-shifting stimuli from the environment and with the physiological (and, in the case of man, the mental) needs of its own being. Organs of peculiar structure and functional capacity obviously were essential to these tasks. All parts of the body acted cooperatively to share in a given vital act. Body and mind were physiologically conjoined, their activity being most evident in movement guided by instinct or intelligence. Gratiolet was less concerned with animal taxonomy than Blainville had been and accorded slight attention to conspicuous, external parts suitable for classificatory purposes. He struck for the heart of the matter; the form and behavior of those neural and muscular mechanisms without which the higher forms of life are inconceivable.

Thus was produced Gratiolet’s first major work: Mémoiré sur les plis cérébraux (1854). Descriptions of the cerebral folds, or convolutions, of the human brain had long been available; Gratiolet added the careful comparative investigation of the brain form of a wide range of monkeys. On the basis of the distribution and degree of cerebral convolution he emphasized the distinctness of the primates as a group. Gratiolet’s anatomical research culminated in the Anatomie comparée du systéme nerveux (1857), a major contribution to mammalian descriptive anatomy. But this comparative anatomy offered far more than description; it presented (part II) Gratiolet’s statement on the nature and meaning of intelligence, the opposed roles of “sentiment” (a consequence of external stimulus), and “sentiment” (evoked independently within the organism), and man’s uniqueness founded on his capacity to reason. These themes were clarified, further developed, and augmented by reflections on the diversity of human races in a notable series of anthropological essays and discussions offered between 1860 and 1865.

Man alone, Gratiolet argued, is to be established as a rational being; only he can speak. Spoken language remained, as it had over the generations since Descartes, the most direct expression of intelligence and the essential criterion of humanity. “This innate and … ineffaceable potentiality [for speech] is certainly the most striking, the most noble character of man…. Only man can have an idea of an idea, and so on almost to infinity.” Implicit in these conclusions was Gratiolet’s conviction, and one which comparative anatomy seemed only to confirm and expand, that human intelligence was in some way a function of the cerebral convolutions. One must, he urged, focus on gross structure until the fortunate day arrived that “one might study directly the brain itself.”

During the 1860’s the question of a localization within the brain (cerebrum) of mental functions was much in dispute. Gratiolet adopted a conservative position: “Generally speaking, I agree with [M. J. P.] Flourens that intelligence is unitary, that the brain is one and that it acts above all as an integral organ [organ d’ensemble].” He took this position less on grounds of negative evidence than on the absence of indisputable data confirming any particular case of localization.

Gratiolet, laying groundwork for his anthropological views, accorded complex instinct and simple judgment to both man and animals. But complex judgments required intelligence and hence were, like imagination, man’s alone. All men possessed intelligence but there shares, apparently, varied. Gratiolet introduced into the prospering multiple-origins conception of the human races (polygenic theory) the embryological criterion. Claiming that the frontal sutures of the developing cranium in whites closed later than those of other races, he found a splendid opportunity for curious “reflection.” “Might not,” he mused, “the long persistence of sutures in the white race have some relation to the almost indefinite perfectibility of intelligence among men of this race? …might not the brain, among these perfectible men, [thus] remain capable of a slow but continuous growth?” Regrettably, among “idiots and lower [abruties) races the cranium is closed upon the brain like a prison.” Not only were the races of man different; it was part of their very nature to be so. Lower races were no degraded Caucasians. They were perfect beings but were placed lower on the scale of creation, a scale which, since Gratiolet dismissed transmutationist hypotheses, must be considered as temporally fixed.

Not wholly consistent with this viewpoint was Gratiolet’s expression of another, and probably more cherished, notion of why some men are elevated and others depressed: The Caucasian manifests an “instinct for civilization.” All whites, from fool to hero, recognized the horrors of that individualism which promotes egoism and scorn for other men and leads to a neglect of social obligation (devoir). All whites, Gratiolet’s strange apology continued, understood the “usefulness of law [and] the necessity to submit to it.” Each must and would sacrifice part of his liberty for the good of the social whole. This remarkable excursus by a cabinet anatomist was not original. It shared fully Blainville’s emphasis on physiology as a model for society and thus that special interest, broadcast by Blainville’s auditor, Auguste Comte, in the inviolable solidarity of the healthful social organism. It is conservative social doctrine entertained by an anatomist of royalist sentiment and tempered with the epoch’s exaggerated interest in racial matters.

Gratiolet displayed patience and industry in the face of constant academic rebuffs. He was exceptionally well-read, particularly in the classics and the literature of philosophy. He commanded deepest friendship, evidencing firm loyalty to his doctrinal allies and candor to all. He was an able and frequent combatant in discussions at the Société d’Anthropologie of Paris, of which he was a founding member. Gratiolet apparently received few or none of the honors due a French scientist of his stature and was overlooked by the Academy of Sciences. Political considerations may have been operative here. Born just after Waterloo and raised in the royalist persuasion, he cast his intellectual foundations in the mold of an outspoken Christian royalist apologist, Blainville. He ably led troops of the National Guard against the republican insurgents of 1848 (but refused decoration for participation in what he called a “civil war”) and was obviously neglected by the Bonapartist ministries of the 1850’s. In good faith he argued a scientific brief for the autonomy of man, the primacy of the Caucasian race, and the necessary and desirable supremacy of traditional European social forms; and in support of his faith he brought great learning as a naturalist and equal facility as an anatomist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Gratiolet published little before 1850. His principal early contribution was a dissertation for the degree docteur en médecine at the Paris Faculty of Medicine: Recherches sur l’organe de Jacobson (Paris, 1845). His major anatomical works are two: Mémoires sur les plis cérébraux de l’homme et des primates, 1 vol. plus plates (Paris, 1854); Anatomie comparée du systéme nerveux considerée dans ses rapports avec l’intelligence, 2 vols. plus plates (Paris, 1839–1857)—this work was planned and begun by François Leuret but the research, organization, and interpretations of vol. II (1857) are due to Gratiolet.

Gratiolet published over fifty scientific papers, some with collaborators. They are listed in Royal Society, Catalogue of Scientific Papers 1800–1863 (London, 1868), II, 989–991; and VII [1864–1873] (1877), 818. Among the more interesting of these papers are the following: “Mémoiré sur les plis cérébraux de l’homme et des primates,” in Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences, 31 (1850), 366–369, a valuable précis of the 1854 vol.; “Mémoiré sur le développement de la forme du cråne de l’homme, et sur quelques variations qu’on observe dans la marche de l’ossification de ses sutures,” ibid., 43 (1856), 428–431; “Mémoiré sur la microcéphalie considérée dans ses rapports avec la question des caractéres du genre humain,” in Mémoiré de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, I (1860), 61–67; “Sur la forme et la cavité cranienne d’un Totonaque, avec réfiexions sur la signification du volume de l’encéphale,” in Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 2 (1861), 66–81; and “Recherches sur l’anatomie du Troglydytes aubryi, chimpanzé d’une nouvelle espéce,” in Nouvelles archives du Muséum d’histoire naturelle (Paris), 2 (1866), 1–264, written with P. H. E. Alix.

On the evening of 20 January 1865 Gratiolet delivered a lecture on physiognomy at the Sorbonne. This remarkable lecture was soon published— “Considérations sur la physionomie en général et en particulier sur la théorie des mouvements d’expression,” in Annales des sciences naturelles. Zoologie et paléontology, 5th ser., 3 (1865), 143–179— as was a posthumous vol. on the subject: De la physionomie et des mouvements d’expression, suivi dune notice sur so vie et ses travaux et de la nomenclature de ses ouvrages, par Louis Grandeau (Paris, 1865; 4th ed., 1882). In the lecture and book Gratiolet explored the notion that, while spoken language was peculiar to man, animals shared with man another language: facial and bodily movement or “expression.”

II. Secondary Literature. Grandeau’s essay on Gratiolet (cited above; also published separately [Paris, 1865]) is the most extensive account of the anatomist. Other notices, all quite personal, include Paul Bert, “éloge de Pierre Gratiolet,” in Bulletin de la Société médicale de I’Yonne (Auxerre) (1868), 17–37; Paul Broca, “éloge funebre de Pierre Gratiolet,” in Mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris, 2 (1865), lxii-cxviii; and Edmond Alix, “Notice sur les travaux anthropologiques de Gratiolet,” ibid., 3 (1865) lxxi-ciii.

William Coleman