CABANIS, PIERRE JEAN GEORGE French physiologist, was born at Cosnac (Correze), and was the son of Jean Baptiste Cabanis (1723-86), a lawyer and agronomist. In i 78g his Observations sur les hopitaux procured him an appoint ment as administrator of hospitals in Paris, and in 1795 he became professor of hygiene at the medical school of Paris, a post which he exchanged for the chair of legal medicine and the history of medicine in 1799. He acted as physician to Mirabeau, and wrote the four papers on public education which were found among the papers of Mirabeau at his death. Cabanis was a member of the Council of Five Hundred and then of the conservative Senate, but his political career ended with the triumph of Napoleon.
His principal work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'/iomme, consists in part of memoirs, read in 1796 and 5797 to the Institute, and is a sketch of physiological psychology. He adopted at first a purely materialistic view, but went over to the vitalistic school of G. E. Stahl, and in the posthumous work, Lettre sur les causes premieres (1824), the consequences of this opinion became clear.