Marie François Xavier Bichat

Marie François Xavier Bichat , born the November 14th 1771 with Thoirette (the Jura) and deceased the July 22nd 1802 with Paris, is a doctor biologist and physiologist French.

Biography

He began his medical studies with Lyon, under Antoine Petit, and came, at the time of the seat of this city (1793), to finish them with Paris. Pierre-Joseph Desault, of which it followed the lessons assiduously was not long in distinguishing it; Bichat became his/her friend, helped it in his work and after its death (1795), published and completed its works.

It entered in 1797 the career of professorship and was soon surrounded listeners. In 1800, it was named doctor of the Hôtel-Dieu, though hardly 29 years old. At the same time as it fulfilled its double functions, it made immense anatomical research and published great works. All its work had already strongly deteriorated its health when it made, on the staircase of the Hospital, a violent fall which resulted in its death (1802) whereas it was only 30 years old.

Homage

“Renovating of the pathological anatomy, Bichat studies, through the autopsy and the physiological experimentation, the role of fabrics like fundamental anatomical units for the explanation of the physiological properties and the pathological modifications of the organization. Father of the modern histology, it bequeaths to the posterity four fundamental works:

a Treated membranes (1800)
of the physiological Research on the life and the death (1800), where it describes in a seizing way the way in which death is propagated between the bodies, and which one retains the aphorism “life is the whole of the functions which resist dead” the
like two treaties of anatomy.

The respect that its work inspires is superbly expressed in the homage which Corvisart pays to him to its death, in a letter with Napoleon 1 {{er}}: “ Nobody in if little time did not do as many things and so well ”.” (National celebrations 2002, Ministry for the Culture and the Communication, france).

To the 20th century the extension and modernization of the Hôpital Claude-Bernard with Paris lead to the creation of a new teaching hospital unit which was named Hôpital Xavier-Bichat.

He belongs to the erudite soixante-douze whose name is registered on the Eiffel Tower.

Publications

He also wrote:

general Anatomy applied to physiology and medicine , 4 volumes in-8, 1801
Descriptive anatomy , 1801 - 1803, 5 volumes in-8, whose last three were published after its death by Matthieu-François-Governed Bush and Philibert-Joseph Roux.

It moreover left manuscripts whose Académie of medicine acquired in 1833.

Bichat adopted the ideas of Theophilus de Bordeu and Paul Joseph de Barthez on the vital force, but by distinguishing the animal life from the organic life: it placed especially the latter in the fabrics which wrapped the internal organs and sought the specific mode of vitality to each fabric.

François Magendie collected his Opuscules , 1827.

Comment on its work

“The physiologist Bichat, glory of the School of Paris (1771-1802), was not romantic, but vitalistic; in reaction against the Physicalism ambient materialist, he professed the irreducible specificity of the Vie, distorted by the method of analysis and the vocabulary used for the study of the vital phenomena. “The science of the organized bodies must be dealt with manner very different from those which have the inorganic bodies for objects. Would have, so to speak, to be employed there a different language; because the majority of the words which we transport of physical sciences in those of the animal or vegetable economy us unceasingly recall to it ideas which are combined by no means with the phenomena of this science. If physiology had been cultivated by the men before physics, as this one was before it, I am persuaded that they would have made many applications of the first to the second, that they would have seen rivers running by the tonic excitation their shores, the crystals meeting by the excitation which they exert on their reciprocal sensitivity, the plants being driven because they are irritated reciprocally at long distances, etc (...) physiology had made more progress if each one had not carried there borrowed ideas of sciences which one calls accessories, but which of it are primarily different. Physics, chemistry, etc, are touched, because the same laws govern their phenomena; but an immense interval separates them from the science of the organic compounds, because an enormous difference exists between these laws and those of the life. To say that the Physiologie is the Physique animals is to give an extremely inaccurate idea of it; I would like as much to say that astronomy is the physiology of the stars. ” (*) Bichat, died in 1802, cannot know that the party taken antiphysicalist of which it evokes the possibility is precisely that which at the same time the romantic Naturphilosophie at the school of Schelling adopts.”

(*) Xavier Bichat, physiological Research on the life and death, 1800,1e left, article 7, par. 1; republication 1852, p. 58-59

Source partial

Georges Gusdorf, the romantic man , Paris, Payot, 1984, p. 78-79 (social sciences and the Western thought XI)

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