Go to http://archive.org and type in the search terms: . Will yield a book on elements of physiology and animal economy by T. J. Aitkin from 1838 and the like (4 books). You can then read them online at archive.org or download them in various formats.

Okay, they are 19th century, but should have references to earlier works in them.

Thanks for the information Joachim!

The manuals are not very difficult to be found. My difficulty is finding studies (articles, theses) about the "Animal Economy".

You mean like: Wolfe &Terada 2008. The animal economy as object and program in Montpellier vitalism. Science in Context 21:537-579?

Thank you Joachim!

Helped a lot!

But this paper focuses mainly upon one physician, Bordeu, founder of the so-called "Organicism school of Paris". On the other side, the authors exclude from their studies Barthez and his disciples, who are in fact the so-called "Vitalisme de Montpellier" ! You can have another historian's study of Vitalism in my paper published in the Journal of Scottish Thought, Volume 4, 2011 : The New Science of Man, Thomas Reid and Paul Jospeh Barthez.

Thank you very much Sabine, and congratulations for the paper!

I think François Quesnay is an essential reference. He is the autor of “Essai physique sur l’oeconomie animale” (1747). In 1756, Quesnay was asked to contribute the article "Evidence" for the Encyclopédie. Quesnay explained how an individual perceives the moral rules and how he learns to follow them (moral freedom is a synonym of intelligence and an antonym of animal freedom). See H. Spencer Banzhaf (2000), “Productive Nature and the Net Product: Quesnay's Economies Animal and Political”, History of Political Economy 32(3): 517 -51.

For Quesnay, both John Locke and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac establish the foundations on which to base reflections about the formation of knowledge.

Another important contribution to this sensualist tradition is Turgot. Specifically, the relationship between the state itself and its projection onto the objects that surround us is the problem tackled in Existence (1756), which he also wrote for Diderot & d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. This essay examines the process of reflection which, unlike Condillac, he does not consider a natural consequence, concluding that the existence and not the presence of these objects is the origin of our needs and the motivation behind our movement. I study this text in “Perfect competition in A.-R.-J. Turgot: A contractualist theory of just exchange”. Economies et Sociétés, série PE: Histoire de la pensée économique 44 (12), 2010: 1885-1916.

If this is the type of problem you are working on, I can send you more scientific bibliography.

François Quesnay was also the founder of the first school of economics, the Physiocrats. Patrick Geddes, Scottish biologist and polymath, wrote a very good paper upon this topic. Geddes was the leader of the Scottish school of neo-vitalism, following Paul Joseph Barthez's vitalism : Living organisms reconnected to their environment and to each others : a complex web of mutual interactions, un system of nature in which nothing lives or dies to itself.

Ruskin, economist, by Patrick Geddes, 1884 :

https://archive.org/stream/johnruskineconom00geddrich#page/n0/mode/2up