Background
Cruveilhier was born on February 9, 1791, in Limoges, France. Nothing is known of his parents.
1837
Jean Cruveilhier in 1837.
5 Boulevard Henri IV, 34090 Montpellier, France
Cruveilhier was trained in medicine at the University of Montpellier, receiving agrégée in surgery in 1823.
anatomist pathologist physician scientist
Cruveilhier was born on February 9, 1791, in Limoges, France. Nothing is known of his parents.
Cruveilhier was trained in medicine at the University of Montpellier, receiving agrégée in surgery in 1823.
Cruveilhier became a professor of anatomy at Paris in 1825 and médecin des hôpitaux in 1826. In the same year, he reorganized the Société Anatomique and was its founding president until 1866. Elected to the Académie de Médecine in 1836, he was its president in 1839. Cruveilhier devoted himself to his enormous practice, following the rules of a very strict ethic that he condensed in his Des devoirs et de la moralité du médecin (1837).
Cruveilhier’s liking for observation revealed to him, during his service at La Maternité, the importance of the concepts of contagion and isolation. As early as 1821, anticipating Stéphane Tarnier, he called for “the elimination of large maternity hospitals and their replacement by home care, to which might be added a certain number of small hospitals situated outside of Paris, capable of accommodating twelve to twenty women in labor, in which each woman would have a private room.”
Cruveilhier was at the same time an experimenter, an anatomist, and a pathologist. In 1836 he became the first holder of the chair of pathological anatomy founded by a bequest of his teacher, Guillaume Dupuytren. At that time he relinquished his chair of normal anatomy to Gilbert Breschet.
His experiments on the formation of callus after bone fractures in pigeons showed Cruveilhier the importance of extraosseous tissues (periosteum, muscles) in the reconstitution of bones of leverage. His injections of mercury into the blood vessels and the bronchial system bore out the theory of phlebitis, which, he said, “dominates the whole of pathology.” It made possible the conceptions of embolism and infarction, which were developed by Virchow beginning in 1846. But while Virchow considered the vascular thrombosis to be the primary lesion and the lesion in the venous wall to be secondary, Cruveilhier thought that alteration of the venous wall generated the thrombosis. Later investigations have confirmed his thesis.
Cruveihier described a valvula at the distal extremity of the lacrimonasal canal that was also known to G. B. Bianchi and Joseph Hasner. He also gave his name to the vertebral nerve in the posterior cervical plexus that issues from the first three cervical Paris. He showed that the styloglossal and palatoglossal nerves can originate in the lingual branch of the facial nerve (Hirschfeld’s nerve) which anastamoses with the glossopharyngeal (Haller’s ansa).
Cruveilhier’s Cours d’études anatomiques (1830), which was expanded into Anatomie descriptive (1834-1836), played a major role in the progress of anatomical studies at the École de Médecine at Paris. E. P. Chassaignac was one of the collaborators on this work. Cruveilhier’s son, Edouard, brought out a new edition (1862-1867) with the assistance of Marc Sée.
The six-volume Anatomie pathologique du corps humain (1828-1842) and the Traité d’anatomie pathologique générale (1849-1864) are Cruveilhier’s true claims to fame for their illustrations, remarkable even today, and for their conception. In them he describes cysts; gastric ulcus rodens, which he isolated from chronic gastric ulcus rodens, colic diverticulosis; progressive muscular paralysis (at the same time as E. Aran and Guillaume Duchenne); “the fibrous bodies of the breast” that, with Velpeau and Sir Astley Cooper, he differentiated from breast cancer; diffuse cerebral sclerosis; the “gelatinous disease” of the peritoneum; and the dilation of the veins abdominal wall giving the appearance of a Medusa’s head, later described by Clemens von Baumgarten. In 1829 he diagnosed a cerebral tumor with localization of the lesion, which had invaded the acoustic nerve. The observation was so precise that nearly a century later (1927) Harvey Cushing found nothing to add to it. In the diagnosis of tumors Cruveilhier described “cancerous juice” as the criterion of malignancy; it was later replaced by the histological criterion.
Cruveilhier knew little of histology, to which one finds only a few allusions in the fifth volume of the Traité, which was edited by his students. Nevertheless, his work has become less dated than some more recent ones that make the most use of the microscope. That is why Virchow called himself Cruveilhier’s disciple and why many of his findings remain valid.
(Volume 1, French Edition)
1851(French Edition)
1864(French Edition)
1845(2 volumes)
1836Cruveilhier was an opponent of large maternity hospitals, favoring home care as well as smaller hospitals with private rooms for women in labor. He performed extensive research involving the vascular system, being remembered for his studies of phlebitis, of which he believed to "dominate all of pathology."
A modest and honest physician, Cruveilhier was not gifted with eloquence. He was neither a great clinician nor a great teacher, neither a credulous disciple nor an innovator. Fond of saying that “system pass and only the facts remain,” he was essentially a researcher who owed his reputation more to his books than to his teaching.
Nothing is known of Cruveilhier's own family.