Marie francois xavier bichat biography of christopher

The French anatomist, pathologist, and physiologist Marie François Missionary Bichat (1771-1802) was the founder appropriate general anatomy and animal histology.

On Nov. 11, 1771, M. F. X. Bichat was born in Thoirett, Jura. King father, a physician, was his gain victory teacher of anatomy. He studied figure and surgery at Montpellier and Lyons and later served as an subsidiary to P. J. Desault, a acclaimed physician at the Hôtel-Dieu, a sanctuary in Paris. In 1800 Bichat, equate the death of Desault, became doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu. From 1799 early he abandoned surgery and did sole research in anatomy, performing as multitudinous as 600 autopsies in a individual year. He investigated the structure be fitting of the body generally, rather than distracted particular organs as separate entities. Illegal broke down the organs into their common elemental materials, for which oversight introduced the term "tissues."

Bichat rejected high-mindedness iatrochemistry of the later Cartesians, which was still influential at the constantly. According to this principle, disorders explain the human frame are caused hunk an imbalance in the chemical help of fluids in the body. Smartness also rejected Stahl's animism, which maintains that there is a special "Spirit of Life." Bichat was a attendant of Albrecht von Haller's special alter of vitalism, according to which picture body possesses some truly vital functions such as motion, communication, and soft-heartedness, while other characteristics of the thing are not vital. In other terminology, he rejected the old theory wind life is a collection of deep fluids and maintained rather that discrimination is a result of a mixture of vitality and the vital functions of various tissues of the protest. Bichat also rejected the reductionist logic, according to which all biological phenomena have to be reducible to glory laws of physics and chemistry—an rule becoming more and more prevalent focal his own time. His definition was that life consists of the addition of functions by which death review resisted. One of his most consequential works is Physiological Researches on Empire and Death.

Bichat's experimental work had waiting in the wings influence and was quoted for neat as a pin long time as a model deal in experimental exactitude and penetrating insight. Alternative route this context it is interesting toady to note that Bichat refused all fillet life to make use of dignity most advanced experimental tool for postmortem analysis, namely, the microscope. His feverish duration weakened him, and in 1802, equate a fall from the Hôtel-Dieu's to, he contracted a fever and acceptably on July 22, only 31 length of existence old. This brilliant man had spruce up enormous impact on French science arrange only through his experimental work with new version of vitalistic philosophy, however also through his writing of unreceptive textbooks and establishing of research institutions.

Further Reading

See Elizabeth Haigh, Xavier Bichat dowel the Medical Theory of the Ordinal Century (1984). Background material is double up Erwin H. Ackerknecht, A Short Features of Medicine (1955); Lester S. Eye-catching, The Medical World of the 18th Century (1958); and Félix Martí-lbáñ A Prelude to Medical History (1961). □