Marie François Xavier Bichat was a French anatomist, pathologist, and physiologist, whose systematic study of human tissues helped found the science of histology.
Background
Marie François Xavier Bichat was born on November 14, 1771, at Thoirette, France, the son of Jean-Baptiste Bichat, a physician and graduate of the Faculté de Médecine of Montpellier, who was then practicing in Poncin-en-Bugey, and of Jeanne-Rose Bichat, a cousin of her husband.
Education
Bichat studied humanities at the Collège de Nantua, completed the course in rhetoric, and was then sent to the Séminaire Saint-Irénée at Lyons to study philosophy.
In 1791 he became the pupil of Marc-Antoine Petit at the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyons, in order to study surgery and anatomy.
Career
In 1800 Bichat, after the death of Desault, became a physician at the Hôtel-Dieu. From 1799 onward he abandoned surgery and did only research in anatomy, performing as many as 600 autopsies in a single year. He investigated the structure of the body generally, rather than studying particular organs as separate entities. He broke down the organs into their common elemental materials, for which he introduced the term "tissues."
Bichat rejected the iatrochemistry of the later Cartesians, which was still influential at the time. According to this principle, disorders in the human frame are caused by an imbalance in the chemical relations of fluids in the body. He also rejected Stahl's animism, which maintains that there is a special "Spirit of Life." Bichat was a follower of Albrecht von Haller's special form of vitalism, according to which the body possesses some truly vital functions such as motion, communication, and sensibility, while other characteristics of the body are not vital. In other words, he rejected the old theory that life is a collection of subtle fluids and maintained rather that life is a result of a combination of vitality and the vital functions of various tissues of the body. Bichat also rejected the reductionist philosophy, according to which all biological phenomena have to be reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry - an attitude becoming more and more prevalent in his own time. His definition was that life consists of the sum of functions by which death is resisted. One of his most interesting works is Physiological Researches on Life and Death.
Bichat's experimental work had great influence and was quoted for a long time as a model of experimental exactitude and penetrating insight. In this context, it is interesting to note that Bichat refused all his life to make use of the most advanced experimental tool for anatomy, namely, the microscope. His feverish activity weakened him, and in 1802, after a fall from the Hôtel-Dieu's staircase, he contracted a fever and died on July 22, only 31 years old. He was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France.
Views
Marie François Xavier Bichat is known as one of the last of the major theorists of vitalism. 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.
Quotations:
"Life consists in the sum of the functions, by which death is resisted."
"Medicine is an incoherent assemblage of incoherent ideas, and is, perhaps, of all the physiological Sciences, that which best shows the caprice of the human mind. What did I say! It is not a Science for a methodical mind. It is a shapeless assemblage of inaccurate ideas, of observations often puerile, of deceptive remedies, and of formulae as fantastically conceived as they are tediously arranged."
"Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not dissipate."
Membership
In 1796, Marie François Xavier Bichat and several other colleagues formally founded the Société d'Emulation de Paris, which provided an intellectual platform for debating problems in medicine.