François Magendie



François Magendie (October 6, 1783 – October 7, 1855) was French physiologist, considered a pioneer in experimental physiology. He is known for describing the foramen of Magendie. There is also a Magendie sign, a downward and inward rotation of the eye due to a lesion in the cerebellum.

His most important contribution to science was also his most disputed. Contemporaneous to Sir Charles Bell, Magendie conducted a number of experiments on the nervous system, in particular verifying the differentiation between sensory and motor nerves in the spinal cord, the so-called Bell-Magendie law. This led to an intense cross-Channel rivalry, with the British camp claiming that Bell published his discoveries first and that Magendie stole his experiments. The bitterness of this scientific rivalry perhaps can only be compared to that between Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke.

Magendie was also a notorious vivisector, shocking even many of his contemporaries with the brutal live dissections that he performed at public lectures in physiology. Unlike Bell, who was extremely reluctant to verify his findings experimentally, Magendie was content to perform painful experiments and dissections of live animals with no clearer purpose than to see what would happen. Richard Martin, an Irish MP, in introducing his landmark bill banning animal cruelty in the United Kingdom, described Magendie's public dissection of a greyhound, in which the beast was nailed down ear and paw, half the nerves of its face dissected, and left overnight for further dissection, and called Magendie a "disgrace to Society." Besides drawing sharp criticism from contemporaries in both Britain and France, later scientists critical of Magendie's methods included Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley. He was also a major impetus of the antivivisection and vivisection reform movements, with Albert Leffingwell dedicating a chapter of his book An Ethical Problem to the man.