FLOURENS, PIERRE. - French physiologist, b. at Thezao on 15 April 1794, d. at Montgeron on 6 December 1867. Professor at the Collège de France and at the Museum. His name is linked with the history of experimentation on the brain and with the discovery of the function of the non-auditory labyrinth. He is also remembered for having first demonstrated the anaesthetic action of chloroform.
F. opposed Gall’s phrenology, with its crude and approximate localizations. According to F., the brain functions as a whole; he therefore denies, at least implicitly, every kind of “localization”; those physiologists who still deny the existence of preformed “centres” (Stefani, Monakoe) refer back to him. He dealt with questions of a general nature, always in an anti-materialist sense. A spirit of the most purely inductive kind, he was not an evolutionist and was among the first to criticize Darwin’s book and hypothesis.