Eugene Dally
| Dr Eugene Dally | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| File:Dally, Eugene.jpg | |||||||||
| Born | 1833 | ||||||||
| Died | 1887 | ||||||||
| Residence |
Paris 5 Rue Legendre, Paris [1885] | ||||||||
| Occupation |
medical anthropologist | ||||||||
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Contents
[hide]Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
proposed as Hon. Fellow 1867.11.05
1879 Assist. Gen. Sec. Anthro.So. Paris
Death noted in report of the council for 1898
Notes From Elsewhere
1875 President of the Anthropological Society of Paris
a medical doctor and anthropologist
close friend of Broca, translator of Huxley
Broca's disciple, the positivist, polygenist physician ...
Dr Eugene Dally (1833-1887), physiotherapist and populizer in France of the benefits of gymnastics, was an active member of the Medico-Psychological Society and the Society of Anthropology of Paris created by Broca. Positivist, uncompromising and anticlerical convinced, he defended clear positions on the responsibility of criminals who anticipate the movement of social defense, and on the proximity of Man and the superior apes who has recently found evidence of its relevance
Eugène Dally in the footsteps of his father Nicolas Dally as both physiotherapist and gymnastics. A disciple of Littré and an intransigent defender of the positivist doctrine, he was also convinced anticlerical and he defended his ideas within those two societies which he joined the same year, at the age of 27 years. His career in the SAP was brilliant (he held his flesh in ethnology) in the footsteps of Broca, of whom he was a fervent disciple. After his translation of Man's Place in Nature by Th Huxley, which allowed him to defend Darwin's ideas, he introduced the concept of transformation to France and shifted Broca's anti-evolutionist stance. Huxley, anticipating the modern works of the primatologists (Frans de Waal). At the SAP he was also a critical opponent of the extrapolations made from dubious anomalies discovered upon examining the brains of criminals with the aim of considering them ill and now explaining their acts. His arrival in the SMP coincided with the opening, which had been agreed (in sign of goodwill to the new conservative power) to non-medical members from the fields of philosophy, law, history and even religion. His work and his interventions are those of a polemicist battling in the clan of physiologists and materialists against the spiritualists and metaphysicians. Hence he took clear-cut, violently anticlerical positions when the issue of the soul was put on the agenda. The deadlock in the debates on such subjects most likely explains the gradual abandonment of multidisciplinarity within the SMP membership. During discussions in 1863, which brought together all the leading lights of the SMP on the issue of criminal responsibility, Dally equally supported an unequivocal position, setting hardened criminals alongside the ill. Thus he defended - in a conscious manner - a theoretical position which considered social defense only.
Eugene Dally is the most committed representative of a generation of anticlerical doctors. His positivist, scientific convictions most likely met with the approval of several members of the SMP who found in him their spokesman. He can be considered to be a forerunner of the movement for social defense and his position on the close ties between Man and the higher apes has more recently proved its relevance.
Publications
External Publications
On the Causes of Human Degeneracy - Eugene Dally
In this classic 1881 presentation to the Anthropology Society of Paris, Professor Eugene Dally discusses the 4 main causes of human degeneracy: 1) pathological, 2) toxicological, 3) climatic and geographic, and 4) sociological. Dally, the Society's Past President (1875), highlights the negative impact of urbanization, noting that "among the sociological causes of degeneracy, urban agglomerations, whose disastrous effect is so great, stand out," and "it is in the heart of such urban crowding that...
de La Place de L'Homme Dans La Nature - Primary Source Edition (French Edition) by Thomas Henry Huxley and Eugene Dally
L'ordre des primates et le transformisme par m.E. Dally 1868
