[Experimental strategies and teleology of the living in diverging contexts--physiological research in Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) and François Magendie (1783-1855)].

At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century in France, Marie-François-Xavier Bichat and François Magendie took quite divergent views on the epistemological and methodological importance of physiological investigations in the experimental life sciences. For Bichat, morphological physiology represented only an auxiliary science for his anatomico-pathological approach to biomedical research. Magendie's experimental physiology diverged considerably from Bichat's foregoing conception: Although the physiological endeavour had to be seen as being essentially based on the localizational work that had afore been performed in the field of pathological anatomy, Magendie sensed that the experimental approach to physiology represented an important epistemic value in itself. This paper traces both the material basis of particular experimental series found in Bichat and Magendie as well as the individual laboratory practices which both experimental investigators used in their daily research. The focus on the epistemological and methodological differences shall be brought in line with that of the French experimentalists' divergent explanatory views on the teleological and functional phenomena in living organisms as well as the physiological pursuit of generating knowledge in the life sciences.