Pierre Cabanis (1757-1808), French physiologist. Cabanis initially practised poetry, but at his father's insistence gave up writing and took up medicine. In 1789, he was appointed administrator of hospitals in Paris. In 1795, he became professor of hygiene at the medical school of Paris, and four years later took the chair of legal medicine and history of medicine. His best known work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, concerns physiological psychology. Cabanis held the materialistic view that the soul is not an entity, but a faculty; and that thought is the function of the brain.