Bichat

Bichat, MARIE FRANÇOIS XAVIER, an epoch-making anatomist and physiologist, was born in 1771 at Thioirette, in the department of Jura. He studied chiefly in Paris under Desault, who adopted him as his son, and whose surgical works he edited. In 1797 he began giving lectures on anatomy, along with experimental physiology and surgery, and in 1800 was appointed physician to the Hôtel-Dieu. Worn out by his unremitting labours, he died of fever in his thirty-first year, July 22, 1802. He was the first to simplify anatomy and physiology by reducing the complex structures of the organs to the simple or elementary Tissues (q.v.) that enter into them in common. This he has done in his Anatomie Générale (2 vols. 1801). In his Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort (1800), he discusses all the functions of organic and animal life, and their mutual relations.