DOCUMENTARY

MARIE FRANCOIS XAVIER BICHAT

Marie François Xavier Bichat (14 November 1771 – 22 July 1802) was a French anatomist and pathologist. He is known as the father of histology. Although working without the microscope, Bichat distinguished 21 types of elementary tissues from which the organs of human body are composed.

Bichat was born at Thoirette in Jura, France. His father was Jean-Baptise Bichat, a physician who had trained at Montpellier and was Bichat's first instructor. His mother was Jeanne-Rose Bichat, his father's wife and cousin. He entered the college of Nantua, and later studied at Lyon . He made rapid progress in mathematics and the physical sciences, but ultimately devoted himself to the study of anatomy and surgery under the guidance of Marc-Antoine Petit (1766–1811), chief surgeon to the Hotel-Dieu at Lyon.

The revolutionary disturbances compelled him to flee from Lyon and take refuge in Paris in 1793. There he became a pupil of P. J. Desault, who was so impressed with his genius that he took him into his house and treated him as his adopted son. For two years he took active part in Desault's work, at the same time pursuing his own research in anatomy and physiology. Desault passed in 1795.

At age 29 he was appointed as the chief physician to the Hotel-Dieu. In 1796, he and several other colleagues formally founded the Société d'Emulation de Paris, which provided an intellectual platform for debating problems in medicine. He died at age 30, fourteen days after falling down a set of stairs at Hotel-Dieu and acquiring a fever.  He is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Bichat's main contribution to medicine and physiology was his perception that the diverse body of organs contain particular tissues or membranes, and he described 21 such membranes, including connective, muscle, and nerve tissue. Bichat did not use a microscope because he distrusted it, therefore his analyses did not include any acknowledgement of cellular structure. Nonetheless, he formed an important bridge between the organ pathology of Giovanni Batista Morgagni and the cell pathology of Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow.

Famously, Bichat defined life as "those set of functions which resist death". He thought animals exhibited vital properties which could not be explained through physics or chemistry

He thought that life was separable into two parts: the organic life (also sometimes called the vegetative system) and the animal life. The organic life was the life of the heart, intestines, and other organs. Bichat theorized that this life was regulated through the ganglionic nervous system, a collection of small independent "brains" in the chest cavity.

In contrast, the animal life involved harmonious, symmetrical organs such as the eyes, ears, and limbs. It included habit and memory and was ruled by the wit and the intellect. This was the function of the brain itself, although it could not exist without the heart, the center of the organic life.

This made Bichat give his last years into Veterinary study. He died a VET.

References: George F. Nafziger (2002) Historical Dictionary of the Napoleonic Era, John G. Simmons (2002). Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today's Medicine, Pierre Auguste Béclard; Xavier Bichat (1823). Additions to the General anatomy of Xavier Bichat . Richardson and Lord

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