La raison des corps : Mécanisme et science médicale , written by Raphaële Andrault, 2016

This book takes as its starting point an epistemological reconstruction of the fundamental tension between vitalism and mechanism in the history of biomedicine as discussed by Jean Rostand (1894-1977) and Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995), and produces an archaeological inquiry into the strong opposition that lies at its classical origins, namely the philosophy, medicine, and anthropology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Raphaële Andrault brilliantly succeeds in shedding new light on this structural antagonism. Using material from René Descartes’s philosophy of living beings as automata, from William Harvey’s medical discovery of blood circulation, and from their respective legacies, her reconstruction reaches its culmination in the analysis of the debate between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. And yet, the book is not a mere description of conflicting and disconnected views, but also seeks to track the ways in which mechanical and animistic approaches to living beings became integrated.