title: Omnis fibra ex fibra: fibre economies in Bonnet's and Diderot's models of organic order.
abstract: In a long-term transformation, that begins in Antiquity but takes a crucial turn in the Renaissance anatomies, the "fibre" becomes from around 1750 the operative building block and at the same time the first unifying principle of function-structure-complexes of organic bodies. It occupies the role that the cell takes up in the cell economies of the second third of the nineteenth century. In this paper, I will first discuss some key notions, technical analogies, and images that are related to "fibre"-concepts from Andreas Vesalius to Albrecht von Haller and then focus on Charles Bonnet's and Denis Diderot's fibre ceconomies. In Bonnet's and Diderot's fibre economies, the self-active, regulating properties of fibre-agents and their material structures, that reach from fibre bundles, tissues and membranes to apparati of organs, are united within the concrete whole of individual organized "systems" or "networks."
authors.affiliation: Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstrasse 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany. tcheung@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Cheung
mesh_terms: D000715:Anatomy / Q000266:history*; D002477:Cells; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D008566:Membranes