In the second half of the nineteenth century and more especially after the 1860s, more and more importance was given in France to the body as a fleshly organism in the interpretation of manifestations of the invisible, which were very numerous in those decades. On the basis of medical experiments carried out in the great Parisian hospitals of la Charité and la Salpêtrière, spiritualists, and Catholic theologians, everybody tried to demonstrate the veracity of his conceptions of visions and hallucinations, using to this end the concrete somatic reality and overabundant and most often opposite arguments.