Omnis fibra ex fibra: fibre economies in Bonnet's and Diderot's models of organic order.
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."
Cheung
Tobias
T
Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstrasse 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany. tcheung@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
D000715:Anatomy / Q000266:history*; D002477:Cells; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D008566:Membranes